On Sunday, July 12, Brother David Steindl-Rast turned 100 years old. For all of us who call him a friend and a teacher, this is a monumental event. But I’m sure Br. David himself, although definitely grateful for having reached such an age in good health, would be the first to downplay the occasion. For, ironically, he has long embraced the maxim: Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away. Throughout his life, he has been concerned precisely with those breath-taking moments – how to bring them about or recognize them by being grateful and awake to the wonder of life itself.

What is more astonishing is that Br. David has never stopped. Even now, he remains wonderfully active – writing from his monastery in Austria, recording his reflections, sending out letters of encouragement to a weary world. His mind is still clear and his arms as open as ever to embrace the world with love and gratefulness.

I have had the great honor of being Br. David’s friend for over 20 years. I also consider him to be my teacher, since his thought and overall philosophy have been central in my life. From our personal encounters over the years, I can also confirm that no one embodies his teachings more completely than he does.

To celebrate Br. David’s centenary, Klaudia Menzi-Steinberger, the indefatigable creator of the digital German library of Br. David’s work (here), has just edited and produced a very beautiful commemorative publication, In Widening Circles (in separate English and German editions). In this book, friends and renowned personalities paint a multifaceted portrait through essays, personal memories, and reflections. Contributors include, among others, the Dalai Lama, Anselm Grün, Fritjof Capra, Joan Halifax, Rupert Sheldrake, David Whyte, and Ken Wilber. All net proceeds from book sales will be donated to a charitable cause of Br. David’s choosing.

I am more than elated that the conversation Jane and I filmed with Br. David in Argentina three years ago (see below), when he was 97, has been included in this book as well as my piece about my first encounter with Br. David. The book is already available and you may order it from Amazon.com (US) here or Amazon.de (Germany) here.

But who is this man whose life so many have gathered to celebrate?

To read the entire essay for free, please click here.

On Sunday, July 12, Brother David Steindl-Rast turned 100 years old. For all of us who call him a friend and a teacher, this is a monumental event. But I’m sure Br. David himself, although definitely grateful for having reached such an age in good health, would be the first to downplay the occasion. For, ironically, he has long embraced the maxim: Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away. Throughout his life, he has been concerned precisely with those breath-taking moments – how to bring them about or recognize them by being grateful and awake to the wonder of life itself.

What is more astonishing is that Br. David has never stopped. Even now, he remains wonderfully active – writing from his monastery in Austria, recording his reflections, sending out letters of encouragement to a weary world. His mind is still clear and his arms as open as ever to embrace the world with love and gratefulness.

I have had the great honor of being Br. David’s friend for over 20 years. I also consider him to be my teacher, since his thought and overall philosophy have been central in my life. From our personal encounters over the years, I can also confirm that no one embodies his teachings more completely than he does.

To celebrate Br. David’s centenary, Klaudia Menzi-Steinberger, the indefatigable creator of the digital German library of Br. David’s work (here), has just edited and produced a very beautiful commemorative publication, In Widening Circles (in separate English and German editions). In this book, friends and renowned personalities paint a multifaceted portrait through essays, personal memories, and reflections. Contributors include, among others, the Dalai Lama, Anselm Grün, Fritjof Capra, Joan Halifax, Rupert Sheldrake, David Whyte, and Ken Wilber. All net proceeds from book sales will be donated to a charitable cause of Br. David’s choosing.

I am more than elated that the conversation Jane and I filmed with Br. David in Argentina three years ago (see below), when he was 97, has been included in this book as well as my piece about my first encounter with Br. David. The book is already available and you may order it from Amazon.com (US) here or Amazon.de (Germany) here.

But who is this man whose life so many have gathered to celebrate?

Born in Vienna in 1926, he lived through war and occupation before emigrating to the US and finding his calling as a Benedictine monk at Mount Saviour Monastery in New York in 1953. But he was not your typical monk. He broke the confines of his own monastic order, and even religion, in order to approach and understand other faiths, embracing and bringing forth what is common in all of them. In the 1960s, with his abbot’s blessing, he became one of the first Catholics officially delegated to Buddhist-Christian dialogue, studying Zen with Japanese masters and forming a friendship with Thomas Merton. He co-founded the Center for Spiritual Studies together with Jewish, Buddhist, Sufi, and Hindu teachers, convinced that at the mystical core of every tradition flows the same living water. For decades, he divided his time between a hermit’s life and lecture tours on five continents, addressing audiences from Harvard professors to Buddhist monks to the United Nations. His many books include The Music of Silence (with S. Lebell), Gratefulness – the Heart of Prayer, Belonging to the Universe (1992 American Book Award), co-authored with F. Capra and T. Matus, and his autobiography, written when he had turned 90, i am through you so i.

His conversations know no boundaries: with the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh, with Desmond Tutu, with physicists like Fritjof Capra – for his curiosity extends beyond religion to the dialogue between spirituality and science – and with millions of ordinary seekers who find in his wisdom a doorway to wonder. For him, interfaith dialogue is never about diplomacy between institutions; it is about true understanding of “the other” and about the friendship between human beings seeking and moving towards the same Great Mystery.

At the heart of his teaching stands an old word he rescued from obscurity and filled with new meaning: gratefulness. Gratitude, in the ordinary sense, depends on receiving something specific, so it comes and goes with circumstances: someone gives, we thank, the feeling fades. But gratefulness, as Br. David teaches it, doesn’t wait for gifts – it is a sustained wakefulness to the gift-character of life itself, to each moment as given. Grate-full-ness is the “great fullness” we experience when we are awake to the present moment. That is why he speaks of grateful living rather than feeling gratitude: it is an orientation we can practice in every moment, not an emotion that visits us occasionally.

Quoting from his little spiritual masterpiece, The Music of Silence, which has been most influential in my life:

• Life is given to us; every moment is given. The only appropriate response therefore is gratefulness.

• Joy is that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens. Normally, we are happy when something good happens, and we are unhappy when something happens that we do not consider good. We pick and choose. But joy is our wholehearted response to whatever opportunity is given to us in any moment. It does not depend on what happens.

• We think that people are grateful because they are happy. But is this true? Look closely, and you will find that people are happy because they are grateful… The opposite of gratefulness is just taking everything for granted.

Crucially, he teaches that we cannot be grateful for everything – no one can be grateful for war, for illness, for loss – but we can be grateful in every moment, for every moment offers its own opportunity, even if only the opportunity to learn through pain and suffering, to grow, or to stand with others.

This simple but radical teaching has reached far beyond his monastic walls: through his many books, through the worldwide community of Grateful Living that he founded, and through his many talks and interviews. His TED talk on gratefulness has been viewed ten million times, while his YouTube video, “A Grateful Day,” is one of the best succinct expositions of his philosophy. He also gave us a simple practice in three steps: stop, look, go. Stop long enough to notice the gift; look at the opportunity it offers; and then go and do something with it. And this, in the end, is the secret behind those moments that take our breath away: they are not rare strokes of luck reserved for the fortunate few but are waiting in every moment for anyone focused and attentive enough to receive them. For Br. David, spirituality is aliveness on all levels. As he explains, “spirituality” comes from “spiritus,” which means “life,” “breath,” “aliveness.”

Happy birthday, dear friend and teacher.

The world is grateful for your work, message, and boundless love radiating in all directions – and so am I.

[For the best viewing experience of the conversation, choose CC English (United States) – not the auto-generated subtitles.]

Num Baby Tiana

There was a time when novelists wrote novels, historians history, philosophers philosophy, and Freud his Totem and Taboo. There was a time when composers composed concertos and symphonies, ballerinas danced on fanciful stages, jugglers and lion tamers paraded in circuses, sculptors sculpted, and Claude Monet stood next to his Impression, Sunrise on April 15, 1874, at the Exposition des Impressionnistes in Paris, waiting for the art critics to evaluate his revolutionary painting. There was a time when people anticipated going to the theater, or opera, or the grand premiere of Gone with the Wind on December 15, 1939, when 300,000 people gathered in Atlanta, Georgia, for the festivities and waited to catch a glimpse of Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable. There was a time when people lived in anticipation: when they waited for the newsboy to toss the rolled newspaper onto the doorstep, when they counted the days for the traveling theater or circus to reach their village, when they refreshed the radio dial to listen to the weekly broadcast of their favorite program, when families gathered in front of the TV on Thursday nights for Cheers, settling into their sofas before the familiar piano theme began and the whole household fell silent to catch every line from Sam and Diane, knowing there would be no pause, no replay, no streaming later. There was a time when creativity in all fields of life was channeled in a few well-defined fields delineated by centuries of convention, and when the things we enjoyed were part of our physical environment, three-dimensional, palpable: We could touch the elephant at the circus, congratulate the ballerina after the play, buy Monet’s painting and take it home.

This era is now gone. It is vanishing in real time in front of our very eyes. Who reads an op-ed or a book nowadays, or goes to the theater or cinema? Who goes to an art gallery or eagerly waits for a radio or TV show to begin? Perhaps some still do – but they no longer define the cultural mainstream. Gradually, everything is moving to the web, morphing into a new digital world that competes with the real world for our attention. Most crucially, the old citadels of culture – newspaper editorial boards, radio and television networks with their traditional and limited time slots, publishing houses with their guarded gates – are giving way to the new digital media and social networks. The arbiters of taste who once decided what deserved ink, airtime, or shelf space now see their authority diluted in a marketplace that no longer recognizes pedigree. This is a new era where everything is becoming digital content to be consumed.

A big round of applause to this new reality! Let us welcome …

The Era of Content Creators!

To read the entire essay for free on my Substack, please click here.

There was a time when novelists wrote novels, historians history, philosophers philosophy, and Freud his Totem and Taboo. There was a time when composers composed concertos and symphonies, ballerinas danced on fanciful stages, jugglers and lion tamers paraded in circuses, sculptors sculpted, and Claude Monet stood next to his Impression, Sunrise on April 15, 1874, at the Exposition des Impressionnistes in Paris, waiting for the art critics to evaluate his revolutionary painting. There was a time when people anticipated going to the theater, or opera, or the grand premiere of Gone with the Wind on December 15, 1939, when 300,000 people gathered in Atlanta, Georgia, for the festivities and waited to catch a glimpse of Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable. There was a time when people lived in anticipation: when they waited for the newsboy to toss the rolled newspaper onto the doorstep, when they counted the days for the traveling theater or circus to reach their village, when they refreshed the radio dial to listen to the weekly broadcast of their favorite program, when families gathered in front of the TV on Thursday nights for Cheers, settling into their sofas before the familiar piano theme began and the whole household fell silent to catch every line from Sam and Diane, knowing there would be no pause, no replay, no streaming later. There was a time when creativity in all fields of life was channeled in a few well-defined fields delineated by centuries of convention, and when the things we enjoyed were part of our physical environment, three-dimensional, palpable: We could touch the elephant at the circus, congratulate the ballerina after the play, buy Monet’s painting and take it home.

This era is now gone. It is vanishing in real time in front of our very eyes. Who reads an op-ed or a book nowadays, or goes to the theater or cinema? Who goes to an art gallery or eagerly waits for a radio or TV show to begin? Perhaps some still do – but they no longer define the cultural mainstream. Gradually, everything is moving to the web, morphing into a new digital world that competes with the real world for our attention. Most crucially, the old citadels of culture – newspaper editorial boards, radio and television networks with their traditional and limited time slots, publishing houses with their guarded gates – are giving way to the new digital media and social networks. The arbiters of taste who once decided what deserved ink, airtime, or shelf space in bookstores now see their authority diluted in a marketplace that no longer recognizes pedigree. This is a new era where everything is becoming digital content to be consumed.

A big round of applause to this new reality! Let us welcome …

The Era of Content Creators!

Behold the era of the “ordinary person” who, with a simple smartphone, can transform himself into a creator of whatever he wishes and instantly reach and affect millions of people. The Freuds, Monets, and Clark Gables of our day do not have to spend years writing a book with a new theory, struggle with colors and ideas to compose a painting, or spend months acting in a major Hollywood movie. This is the new era of your next-door neighbor, your teenage daughter’s best friend, your own aunt who at 70 discovered her hidden talent. It is the era of the Hulett Brothers who specialize in weird, humorous, complex trick shots that they spend days or weeks to perfect; Grandma Droniak, who at 96 makes videos (from her nursing home!) proudly proclaiming to her — fifteen million followers — that she is “still alive”; the three-year-old Chinese girl Num Baby Tiana whose parents upload videos of her eating with incredible enthusiasm and curiosity, immersing herself completely in the experience. It is also the era of the Notorious Foodie and Shanye, two amateur cooks who have reinvented the cooking video through a style so original it defies imitation. The Notorious Foodie creates imaginative gourmet dishes from a home kitchen, while Shanye cooks outdoors in idyllic forests, beside rivers and lakes. What sets them apart is not culinary expertise but something rarer and harder to teach: an instinct for visual storytelling. Each video unfolds with its own rhythm, atmosphere, and sense of discovery, turning a simple recipe demonstration into a short, compelling film. You watch not only to learn how a dish is made, but because you genuinely want to see what happens next.

Hulett Brothers

Grandma Droniak

Shanye

And above all of them, on his golden throne, sits the 26-year-old Senegalese, Khabane (Khaby) Lame, the most-followed creator on TikTok with 160 million followers. He recently signed a landmark commercial deal in which he basically sold his brand for about a billion dollars to another company to commercialize it. The company is even allowed to create an AI version of him that will create new content! Khaby Lame is actually the best expression and symbol of this new era – which basically began about fifteen years ago with the proliferation of touch-screen smartphones. What he did, albeit being quite simple and unsophisticated, was something that appeared for the first time in the world – a completely new type of content: He had begun posting silent reaction videos on TikTok during the pandemic, mocking overly complicated “life hack” videos of other creators. He made funny grimaces and gestures without ever talking – a style that made his content universally accessible. That’s it. A clever idea finely executed by a guy with an expressive face. What he does is not even Mr. Bean-style comedy. There is no script, no acting, no directing. One camera, one face, in one room – extreme minimalism elevated to global spectacle.

All of these creators are part entertainer, part journalist, part marketer, part entrepreneur. And the overwhelming majority create their content in their own homes. What once required patronage from the wealthy, institutional approval, or geographic proximity now requires only Wi-Fi. Some of these content creators have built virtual communities of hundreds of thousands or millions of followers. The hierarchy of fame has flattened; celebrity now sprouts from the soil of the everyday. Andy Warhol’s prophetic statement has materialized: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.” Most importantly, a good proportion of creators have reinvented patronage: Content posted on platforms like OnlyFans, Patreon, and Substack is monetized, allowing fans to bankroll the content they love. So, for the monthly price of a cup of coffee, fans can support their favorite musician, author, or teacher – turning every follower into a micro-patron. Even esoteric niches thrive: erotic performers deliver tailor-made adult “private” experiences on OnlyFans, personal coaches serialize self-help lectures on Substack, and indie filmmakers fund new shorts on Patreon – a platform that has surpassed 25 million paid memberships and distributed over $10 billion in cumulative payments to creators since its founding thirteen years ago.

Perhaps the most revolutionary feature of this new era is this: Because the human imagination knows no limits, content can be anything one can conceive of, provided it attracts an audience. For millennia, audiences signaled what they wanted, and creators strove to satisfy it (demand preceded supply); now creators come up with the most unexpected, unimaginable, bizarre “content.” This content is thrown out into the world (like a fisherman throws his hook in the sea) and if it catches fish, lo!, in a few weeks or months the creator ends up with hundreds of thousands or millions of followers eager for more. The words of Steve Jobs were not only prophetic but are now defining this very era that he basically ushered in with the iPhone: “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Although he was talking about the invention of consumer technologies, this perfectly applies to what the digital creators do: They create something people don’t yet know they need! So there are now channels on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram that publish content beyond anything that would have been conceivable until fifteen years ago.

Ngochan67a

Being a caught-fish myself, I have discovered hundreds of new universes of entertaining/useful/educational content in fields of human endeavor that have never before existed. I find myself following the most bizarre “content creations,” such as Ngochan67a on TikTok, which features videos of a biker heavily overloading his motorbike with goods – sometimes stacked above the rider – navigating a narrow, curvy, and muddy uphill road in rural Vietnam. The appeal lies in the contrast between the bike’s small size and the giant loads it carries as it carefully climbs the steep slopes and manages the endless hairpin bends in the mud. I have traveled along such muddy and scary roads on the back of similar riders during my travels, and when I watch these videos, I feel transported to those remote rural areas of Asia. It seems as if the videos are unrehearsed and that someone spontaneously films the biker, but when you watch carefully, there is a lot of care in the filming, and the cameraman or cameramen are positioned in the ideal places to capture the various feats of the biker. Irrespective of how it originally began, or whether it is now successfully monetized, this is now a professional channel that is followed by 1.4 million people.

Gravity Defied

Likewise, many other channels bring to the fore strange and original skills that their creators have mastered over the years. Now it has become possible for these skills to be shared with the whole world. Mr. Gravity Defied, another creator I follow, balances full glasses with nuts and coins and any other strange object he may think of, in the process creating what I consider to be extremely beautiful works of performance art. Others make social commentaries, explain the nuances of various cultures, cover the war in Ukraine, provide psychological advice for a host of situations, teach people how to dress (see below), travel around the world presenting different places, teach their children (and those who watch the videos) social etiquette … The list of the types of new content goes into the thousands. It is estimated that there are currently 200 to 300 million content creators in all the broad categories: micro-, macro-, and mega-influencers, bloggers, YouTubers (longform video), TikTokers (shortform videos), User Generated (promotional) Content (UGC), podcasters and audio creators. If we assume the true number lies somewhere in between – say, 250 million – then one in every 33 people on the planet is a creator of some form!

Ask Okey

The astonishing fact that modern technology has, in just fifteen years, allowed one in 33 people to express themselves in such innumerable ways reminds me of something the great Indian yogi and philosopher Swami Vivekananda said over a hundred years ago: that the time will come when religion will become deeply personal and experiential, rather than institutional and sectarian, and that every man will end up having his own religion. Well, what he said about religion now holds true of creativity. Applying his prediction in another field:

I can foresee a day not so far into the future when every person on the planet will end up being the creator of unique and original content that can be shared with the whole world!

And just as we now have IDs and passports, every person will have their own personal social media platform on which to publish their content, and which will constitute their unique identity/brand/expression in the world. The content each person creates could be something entertaining, or useful, or educational. Creativity will then cease to be the domain of the few and explode to unimaginable heights.

I too am a creator, since I publish the Tuesday Letter every other week and maintain a website on which I post additional material including photos and interviews I have given or conducted. That said, I do not self-characterize as a blogger or content creator but rather as an old-fashioned writer who publishes philosophical essays and books – the other material merely supplementing my main vocation. I often wonder why I do this: Is it because I feel that writing per se is a remnant from a previous era? Or because I think my content does not really partake of the modern technological revolution that the younger generations have bought into? Or is it because of an unconscious-now-conscious arrogance that views “classic writing” as belonging to a more elevated form of expression? Or perhaps deep down I resist the composite noun “content creator” itself, since the word “content” is being stretched to incorporate everything – from TV-content to the content of a tuna tin? Well, maybe it’s all of them together!

Or perhaps the reason lies deeper still, which brings us back to the very beginning (if not the originating cause!) of this essay: Maybe I experience a sense of yearning for the era in which I lived most of my life. Having grown up in the “analog era” of newsboys (though in Cyprus, the job was done by old men!) and radio dials, I often yearn for that sweet anticipation of the traveling circus approaching my town. But as somebody who studies, seeks to understand, and ultimately embraces the new, I know there is no going back. The analog world is rapidly giving way to an era in which billions of people with unbounded creativity will continue to emerge, in the process overcompensating for what our generation feels it has lost – although, with a wink of irony from fate, I have just noticed that an Italian circus is visiting my island this week!

NOTE: I am taking a break from writing. I have moved to a mountain retreat to read and reconnect with my center. I will not be publishing anything for the next six months. During this time, feel free to explore my other essays on Substack and more content on my website. I wish you all a most creative spring and summer full of new travels and explorations.

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Dear Friends,

With the most recent ongoing wars – in Iran and Lebanon – and of course, the four-year-old one in Ukraine, it has not been easy for me to disconnect from the news in order to write philosophical essays. My last Tuesday Letters addressed aspects of these wars (the Zelensky essay, the Trump Era op-ed, The Arrogance of Power longform piece), while Jane’s travel piece on Iran highlighted the fact that Iran is a country with real people, with whom we are all connected via our common humanity.

Yet by following these wars in depth, I feel that I am pursuing other people’s agendas. I’m allowing, like many of you, the politicians and power-hungry world leaders to hijack my precious time and negatively influence my psychology and overall well-being. As a result, I find myself living on a “sidetrack” of life, having deserted my life’s main highway. I have allowed “the News” to infiltrate my everyday life and to leave me feeling estranged. I’m sure many of you can relate. About a year ago, I addressed this phenomenon in my essay On Escaping from the News, where one of my main methods of dealing with it was simply disconnecting:

“The fourth and final step to liberate ourselves from the news’ suffocating tentacles is to actually … go back in time and pretend we are living in the nineteenth century! We may, for example, disconnect for a week or two from all the news and discover that we didn’t miss it. Being disconnected will actually allow us to have more time, more peace of mind, more energy to pursue our creative endeavors. It is not by chance that more and more people nowadays seek retreats in remote places to disconnect from the digital information-flood in order to reconnect with their center and creativity.”

Following my own advice, I have decided to “reclaim my main highway” – my life as a whole, in fact – even while still being preoccupied with the wars and writing about them. (Writing is, after all, my main highway, so even this is a form of reclaiming.) I have therefore retreated to a family cottage in a small hamlet in the Troodos mountains, where life seems to have stood still – literally in the nineteenth century! Here, I mainly read and allow my soul to partake of the beauty of Nature and the simplicity of rural village life. Those of you who have been following my writings for years know that at the heart of much of my thought and life lies the concept of the Main Highway – the idea that our individual vocation is what gives meaning and purpose to our life. I have explored this concept in the very first chapter of my book Conversing with Cavafy. As I attempt to reconnect with my center and resist the distracting forces of the world, I have actually re-read this essay – to remind myself of my own “teaching”! It feels most relevant right now, and it may help you too to reorient your life to its own purpose – without, of course, forgetting the wars themselves. It is one thing to reorient one’s life and another to remain informed. So here is this essay in full.

Nicos

All of us live two separate lives.

These lives inhabit two different worlds. So, we live simultaneously in two different dimensions!

In one life we write, or compose, or think, or construct, or produce something. In the other we eat, go to the toilet, run errands, clean the garage, appear at court, sit in the doctor’s waiting room. In the one life we do what we are meant to do — we live “properly,” so to speak. In the other life we are dragged and pulled by the necessary insignificancies of everyday commonality.

The writer has to stop writing for a while in order to give interviews, market his book, negotiate his cut with his publisher. The artist has to stop painting so that she may search for a gallery to represent her, find clients for her work, move to a new studio with lower rent. The singer has to stop cultivating his voice so that he can deal with lawyers, promote his new song, respond to his critics. When the author writes, the artist paints, and the singer sings, they inhabit one world: we may call it the main highway of life. When they are engaged in all the other incidental sidetracks of being alive, they inhabit the other world.

Yet we seem to be able to move effortlessly from the one life to the other. Most times, we are not even aware of this switching between the two worlds. We are just passive witnesses to its occurrence. One minute the writer thinks or writes, the next minute the phone rings, or the doctor appointment is approaching, and all work must come to a halt in what seems like a seamless transition from one world to the other. This effortless movement hides from our constant view the reality that we truly live two lives.

To read the entire essay for free, please click here.

All of us live two separate lives.

These lives inhabit two different worlds. So, we live simultaneously in two different dimensions!

In one life we write, or compose, or think, or construct, or produce something. In the other we eat, go to the toilet, run errands, clean the garage, appear at court, sit in the doctor’s waiting room. In the one life we do what we are meant to do — we live “properly,” so to speak. In the other life we are dragged and pulled by the necessary insignificancies of everyday commonality.

The writer has to stop writing for a while in order to give interviews, market his book, negotiate his cut with his publisher. The artist has to stop painting so that she may search for a gallery to represent her, find clients for her work, move to a new studio with lower rent. The singer has to stop cultivating his voice so that he can deal with lawyers, promote his new song, respond to his critics. When the author writes, the artist paints, and the singer sings, they inhabit one world: we may call it the main highway of life. When they are engaged in all the other incidental sidetracks of being alive, they inhabit the other world.

Yet we seem to be able to move effortlessly from the one life to the other. Most times, we are not even aware of this switching between the two worlds. We are just passive witnesses to its occurrence. One minute the writer thinks or writes, the next minute the phone rings, or the doctor appointment is approaching, and all work must come to a halt in what seems like a seamless transition from one world to the other. This effortless movement hides from our constant view the reality that we truly live two lives.

Enter Isaac Newton. This is the man who discovered and described the physical laws that govern the mechanics of the universe — one of the greatest minds in history. The poet Alexander Pope had written of him in his famous epitaph, “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.” This is the Newton we all know. But Newton had another life too. Actually, he had three other lives, all while engaged in his major discoveries.

In 1696, Newton moved to London to take up the post of warden at the Royal Mint, and three years later, upon the death of the Master of the Mint, he became the Master himself, a position he held for the last thirty years of his life. Newton estimated that twenty percent of the coins taken in during the Great Recoinage of 1696 were counterfeit. Taking his job very seriously, he decided to go after the counterfeiters. Disguised as a habitué of bars and taverns, he gathered much of that evidence himself! After having arrested many suspects, he conducted more than one hundred cross-examinations of witnesses, informers, and suspects. In all, he successfully prosecuted twenty-eight coiners.

In another of Newton’s parallel lives, he invested all of his money in shares of the South Sea Company, the hottest stock in England at the time. After cashing out early and making some good profit, the price of the stock continued to go up. Feeling he was being left out while others were still profiting, he reinvested everything in the stock again — when it finally crashed, he lost, like a novice, his entire fortune.

Newton also had a bitter feud with the German philosopher and mathematician Friedrich Leibniz. They both claimed they had invented the mathematical system of calculus, and the case ended up in courts where both tried to accuse the other of plagiarism. Newton and Leibniz both spent a big part of their later lives dealing with this issue.

Enter Ludwig van Beethoven. When his brother Kaspar died in 1815, Kaspar’s son, Karl, was the only child of the three Beethoven brothers. Even before Kaspar’s death, Beethoven had seen himself as the guardian of his nephew. He was determined to rescue the sole Beethoven of the next generation from the clutches of the boy’s (as he saw it) immoral mother, Johanna. Therefore, after Kaspar’s death, Beethoven waged a protracted legal action against his sister-in-law. For nearly two years, he composed nothing. He became completely obsessed with becoming a “father” to his nephew. Karl himself naturally became emotionally confused — the legal actions took place while he was between the ages of nine and fourteen. After finally winning the custody case, Beethoven forbade Karl to see his mother, but the boy disobeyed him, running away frequently to be with her. On one occasion, Beethoven called the police to have him forcibly returned. In 1826, in a state of supreme emotional turmoil, Karl bought a pistol with the intention of committing suicide. His landlord found out and alerted Beethoven, but later that same year, Karl pawned his watch and bought another pistol. With both pistols and a supply of gunpowder, he climbed to the Rauhenstein ruins in Baden, loaded both guns, and put them to his head. He missed with one, and with the other he grazed his temple. When he was found, he asked to be taken to his mother’s house. The combination of the attempted suicide and Karl’s return to his mother devastated Beethoven.

But this is not all. Beethoven, over the course of his life, would suffer from loss of hearing, colitis, rheumatism, rheumatic fever, typhus, skin disorders, abscesses, ophthalmia, inflammatory degeneration of the arteries, jaundice, chronic hepatitis, and cirrhosis of the liver. Later in life, he also became deaf. All the diseases of the universe descended upon him! Furthermore, he was forced to give piano lessons, which he hated doing, in order to maintain his standard of living. And while he was publishing his music, he spent time setting the tone of critiques of his work in the leading music journal of the day, by demanding that the editor not publish negative reviews if the publication wanted to continue receiving copies of Beethoven’s work!

As he was composing his masterpieces, Beethoven’s second life was enmeshed in all these diverse challenges. Beethoven the Great Composer was living a parallel life that had nothing or little to do with the main highway of his life.

None of these things about Newton or Beethoven are well-known, or if they are, they rarely come up in any discussion of their actual work. When we view Seeman’s noble portrait of Newton sitting in front of his desk holding his Principia, we cannot imagine him disguised in a big mustache, posing as a builder or clerk and talking with locals at some pub with the aim of catching crooks! And when we imagine Beethoven composing his Fifth Symphony, we cannot think of him shouting in court or dealing with his colitis. Their “second real life” left no trace behind. It has become completely invisible to us, although it was very real to them. For we consider the substance of their lives to be identical with what they created and bequeathed to us. The details of their lives, the daily occurrences of their time on earth, do not seem to concern anybody, apart perhaps from a few academics or biographers. The lives of these two greats, and how we view them, suggest that although we each live at least two lives, in the end it is the main one, the highway, that counts.

But why does only the one count? And if this is so, what are we to do with the other life? For we cannot wish it to vanish, nor can we forcefully expunge it from existence! Let us try to answer these questions.

In his influential book The Myth of the Eternal Return, the historian-philosopher Mircea Eliade explains how in archaic society, the ordinary events of one’s everyday life were trimmed off and any act became “real” only insofar as it imitated or repeated the behavior of an archetypal hero. Even today, we still do what our ancestors did: the lives of our heroes — the exemplary figures in history whom we hold in high esteem (such as Newton and Beethoven), or the characters in the myths and fairy tales we grew up with — are stripped of any mundane details. In fact, these archetypal, mythical, idealized lives that we all admire are much more real to us than the actual lives their real counterparts led. It is this ahistorical character of the lives of people whom we admire that carries a deep meaning for us, that moves our soul. Actually, even though we live in an age when the imitation of archetypal figures, Nature’s cycles, and the concept of the regeneration of time are not as central in our lives as they used to be in the lives of our ancestors, there still remain nodal points of experience that make us reconnect with the archaic man within us. For example, every year during Eastern Orthodox Easter, the Passion of Christ is reenacted during Holy Week, and many devout Christians go through all the emotions and experiences of Jesus, reliving the moments of his last days — just as primitive man partook of the life of his heroes by imitating their actions at specific times of the year. Similarly, in Hindu and Buddhist cultures, such ceremonies or festivals repeat, in exactly the same manner, stories, myths, and heroic acts that have become archetypal and central to how they view their place in the cosmos.

But we do not only embellish and idealize the lives of our Newtons and Beethovens, or our Christs and Buddhas. Just as primitive man stripped his heroes and gods of everything ordinary and insignificant, we too do the same without realizing it to our own lives! In fact, our individual lives, just like those of archaic man, obtain their substance and value through a covert comparison, or rather measuring, of our own aims, dreams, ambitions, acts, achievements vis-à-vis those qualities in the individuals we admire and/or try to emulate. We do not only remember other people as being tantamount to their important acts and works, in effect discarding the details of their day-to-day lives; we do exactly the same thing when it comes to the retelling of our own biography. When examined carefully, no human biography, either told or written, is a real exposition of a life’s details. On the contrary, every biography is the distillation, out of the myriad events in a person’s lived experience, of those events that withstood historical time and stood out as “meaningful.” The autobiography of Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis,1 Report to Greco, for example, has no mention of his first bitter divorce, nor of his financial difficulties, nor of his excommunication by the church. Similarly, Bryan Magee’s2 Confessions of a Philosopher does not concentrate on the ephemeral details of the British philosopher’s life as a husband, a father, a member of parliament, or even as the TV star that he was for a while. Rather, it describes those nodal points during which the crucial transformations in his philosophical thinking occurred. The autobiography is none other than the evolution of his personal understanding of life and the world. It is not the biography of the person Magee, but of someone who becomes an archetypal philosopher by recounting his own life ahistorically. Lying outside history and time, his life, as he himself ended up seeing it, is not the collection of how many times he visited the dentist, washed the dishes, or repaired his car. It is not even how he raised his daughter, or how he ended up being a most recognized TV personality. Rather, it is his philosophical seeking as it molded and guided his life’s-journey. This seeking is not very different from an Odyssey in the sea of philosophical ideas, and he himself no different from archetypal Odysseus inexhaustibly moving towards a final Ithaka of answers and meaning.

And herein lies the answer to the first of the questions posed above: why does only one of our two lives count in the end? Because it is the one that makes us who we are and who we are meant to be. It is the one that makes a Newton, Newton and a Beethoven, Beethoven. It is the one that makes you the writer, a writer; you the artist, an artist; you the singer, a singer; and (lest we be accused of elitism) you the home cook, the next Gordon Ramsey! It is this first life that counts, because it is this one that transcends Time and, like the archetypal exemplary models of archaic man, gives value and meaning to our mortal existence.

But what are we to do with the other life?

The most important first step is to become aware of these two lives and see them for what they are, to observe them and be mindful of their existence. But there are a few serious paths we may follow:

The simplest and easiest way — albeit the least imaginative — to deal with the relationship between our two lives, the way suitable for modern man working in a big city with a hundred errands to run and to-do lists to complete, is to introduce an inner alarm that would ring every so often to bring us back to the main highway of our life: “What are you spending your time on?” it would whisper in our ears. “Go back to your important work!” This simple method ensures that we minimize the time we give to the lesser life and instead concentrate on the higher one. Such an inner whispering may be likened to the concept of memento mori, whose strange origin is worth recalling here: In Ancient Rome, successful generals were awarded a magnificent ceremony in the capital called a “triumph.” The general, who wore a crown of laurel and regalia that suggested he was a demigod, rode a four-horse chariot through the streets of Rome. In his wake followed his army, captives, and spoils of war. The crowds cheered and admired him. It is said that in order for all these things not to go into his head, a slave standing next to him was assigned the job of whispering memento mori in his ear, reminding him that all honor and fame is temporary, and death will one day take everything away. The only difference between memento mori and the idea of the inner alarm bringing us back to the main highway is that we must create the inner slave tasked with regularly whispering in our ear that we must return to what is central in our life.

At the other extreme, the most radical way to deal with the problem is to follow the example of many hermits and monks, who first escape from the mundane world and then firmly subdue the lesser life to the higher one. In the Orthodox Christian monasteries of Mount Athos, for example, where this path is followed to its extreme, the monks are supposed to remain constantly within the main highway of their life of prayer, devotion, and mindful activity. For this reason, even while they eat, rather than being allowed to enjoy their food, they must perforce concentrate on the words of the monk who reads from the scriptures during the meal. Furthermore, “free time” during the day is kept to a minimum so that the monk may not sidetrack himself with any other activities that are unrelated to his communion with God and the community.

But there is a third way, which also partly includes the philosophy of the monk, yet is easier and more all-encompassing. Borrowing to recontextualize a Buddhist term, we may call it “the middle way.” In order to harmoniously incorporate the one life into the other, one must try to express or see — in the ordinary occurrences of everyday life — the values and the substance of the main highway. One may witness this among the Hindus of Bali, where the profane is transformed into the sacred through continual mindfulness. Everything the Balinese do obtains its larger meaning within their religious cosmology and ethics. It is not uncommon to see a Balinese kebab vendor, before commencing his work, consecrating his outdoor grill and charcoals by creating a beautiful offering and placing it inside the grill. Homes, public spaces, even rice fields are scattered with various statues of gods and spirits to constantly remind others to incorporate whatever they are doing at the moment into the higher life they must lead. In a sense, this is none other than the ideal of the synthesis of all yogas, propounded by Sri Aurobindo,3 which aims at turning every single element and event of one’s life into something that furthers his path towards perfection. We could say that this is equivalent to bringing the monk’s attitude into our daily life, without having to escape from the world.

But one need not travel to the East to see an application of this principle. Western writers, poets, composers, artists, and more have throughout history been accomplishing the same thing. They have been taking the commonplace elements of their everyday life and transforming them into parts of their main highway. The most radical were the artists of the twentieth century who first dared to take ordinary everyday objects and turn them into art. Marcel Duchamp took a urinal and simply placed it in an art exhibition, proclaiming it to be in itself a piece of art because he had designated it as such. Marcel Proust,4 who happened to be a contemporary of Cavafy, managed to squeeze many memories, feelings, and ideas out of the most pedestrian activities. He “mentally mined” ordinary events and expressed them in such original and beautiful language that he created a revolution in literature almost as monumental as that of Newton’s in physics and Beethoven’s in music. His famous masterful description in his monumental work In Search of Lost Time — of how the soaking of a cake in tea awoke in the deepest recesses of his soul his childhood memories at his aunt’s house — is a perfect example of the transmutation of an ordinary everyday instance into an event that has become immortal.

Cavafy, who had read a part of Proust’s long novel, expressed his utmost admiration for the language and literary merit of the work. He read it later in life, after he had written most of his poetry, so we cannot say that Proust had any direct influence on him. But we can speculate that he may have seen in Proust’s work some elements of his own art and definitely some elements of what we may call the same striving, especially with respect to the transmutation of the everyday and mundane into Art. For Cavafy too is a great example of a poet who took the most ordinary, even banal observations in his life in Alexandria and turned them into great poetry. Cavafy distills the substance and meaning of insignificant everyday events by focusing on small instances and bringing out the extraordinary in the ordinary. All these usually unremarkable events were connected to his obsession with Eros (with the possible exception of the poem “An Old Man”). As W.H. Auden said in his introduction to Rae Dalven’s translation of Cavafy’s poetry, “The erotic world he depicts is one of casual pickups and short-lived affairs.” But his powerful feelings and sensations during these brief erotic encounters — coupled with his “emotion recollected (later) in tranquility,” as William Wordsworth5 would have it — led to the creation of poems that far outlasted these short-lived affairs.

Let us take the poem “One Night,” where the very ordinary setting of the “cheap and sordid room” and the “voices of workmen playing cards” become the place where Cavafy experiences erotic ecstasy of such intensity that the memory of it will later be transmuted into a great poem:

One Night

The room was cheap and sordid,
hidden above the suspect taverna.
From the window you could see the alley,
dirty and narrow. From below
came the voices of workmen
playing cards, enjoying themselves.

And there on that common, humble bed
I had love’s body, had those intoxicating lips,
red and sensual,
red lips of such intoxication
that now as I write, after so many years,
in my lonely house, I’m drunk with passion again.

But Cavafy was also a sharp observer of little details in the behavior of others. His power of attention can be seen in a number of poems describing unremarkable everyday incidents involving other young homosexuals in his own city. Like a voyeur, the poet notices all the details of their encounters. My favorite Cavafean transmutation of the everyday into a work of Art is one of his last poems, “He Was Asking About the Quality—.” My feeling is that Cavafy witnessed this exact scene and felt a responsibility, as a homosexual himself, who understood and appreciated what was going on, to immortalize it.

He Was Asking About the Quality

He came out of the office where he’d been hired
in an insignificant, low-paying job
(his monthly salary no more than eight pounds: tips included),
when the dreary job, over which
he stooped all afternoon, was finished.
He came out at seven, and strolled slowly
and idled around in the street. — Handsome;
and interesting: as he seemed to have attained
the full potential of his sensuous beauty.
He’d turned twenty-nine the previous month.

He kept idling around in the streets and the shabby
back alleys leading to his home.

While passing in front of a small shop
where some goods were on sale,
shoddy and cheap, for working folk,
he saw a face inside, a figure,
that urged him on, and he entered pretending
he was looking for coloured handkerchiefs.

He was asking about the quality of the handkerchiefs
and what they cost in a choked voice,
almost faded to a whisper by desire.
And accordingly came the answers,
absentmindedly, in a subdued voice,
intimating latent consent.

All the while they kept talking about the merchandise,
but their one and only objective: to touch hands
over the handkerchiefs; to draw near
their faces and their lips, as if by chance;
a momentary contact of their limbs.

Hurriedly and furtively, lest the shopkeeper
sitting in the back were to suspect something.

See how Cavafy takes every small detail of the encounter and transforms it into poetry: the choked voice of the protagonist, the other’s latent consent, the “keeping on finding something to say” in order to draw the encounter out longer, the way they furtively try to come closer and touch one another.

There were other usually passing and short erotic encounters in ordinary or even squalid places, which, by virtue of the fact that they impressed themselves forever in the poet’s memory, became years later the inspiration for well-crafted poems. The common element in all these is the utterly ordinary and unimpressive nature of the encounters that engendered them. In “Outside the House,” as Cavafy passes a house he used to have erotic encounters in as a young man, the memories of those encounters seem to mysteriously lighten and envelop the whole neighborhood and make his entire being “exude the pentup sensual emotion” from that long gone era. In “The Afternoon Sun,” again he passes an old room in a house that has been renovated into business offices, and he remembers the decoration and the details of the old room where he made love decades ago.

Cavafy’s obsession with taking these pedestrian and unimpressive moments from past erotic encounters and transforming them into poetry brings to mind, apart from Proust, yet another contemporary of Cavafy — Rainer Maria Rilke.6 In one of his letters, Rilke had this to say about the transformational work of a poet:

… these phenomena and things should be comprehended by us in a most fervent understanding and transformed. Transformed? Yes, for our task is to impress this provisional, perishable earth so deeply on ourselves — so deeply, so painfully, so passionately — that its very essence may rise again invisibly within us. We are the bees of the invisible. Like busy bees we gather the nectar of the visible and accumulate it in the golden honeycomb of the invisible.

But what exactly is this “honeycomb of the invisible?”

I understand it to be none other than the Timeless element of whatever we create in Time. And the degree to which our Time-bound existence in this body succeeds in transforming whatever it creates on this earth into Beauty, Perfection, Harmony — which are Timeless — is the degree to which we succeed in translating “the nectar of the visible” into that “golden honeycomb of the invisible.”

And just as Rilke was self-conscious about his own work of transformation, it seems that the older Cavafy became most conscious of how he took the “provisional and perishable” — the earthly, bodily, sensual events of his life — made them “rise again invisibly” within him, and then turned them into poetry. We see this self-awareness concerning “the golden honeycomb of the invisible” expressed very clearly in four other poems:

“Their Origin” concludes that the utterly insignificant event in the poem has value only inasmuch as it gave rise to the poem itself. It is basically the archetype of a self-referential poem: a poem about the same poem’s birth!

In “Melancholy of Jason …” Cavafy laments his aging body, and then says that the only way he can withstand this “wound from a merciless knife” is to transform everything into poetry.

We have the same idea in “To Stay”:

To Stay

It was an hour after midnight or so.7

In a corner of the tavern,
behind the wooden partition.
Aside from us two, the place completely empty.
An oil lamp barely lit it.
The tired waiter was dozing by the doorway.

No one would have seen us. But anyway
we were so aroused
we had become unfit for precautions.

Clothes half undone — not that we were wearing much
for divine July was scorching hot.

Rapture of flesh between
the half undone clothes;
quick baring of flesh — its image
has traversed twenty-six years; and has now come
to stay in this poem.

In the sudden self-reflective twist of the last stanza, Cavafy leaves in a sense the poem itself, in order to describe the process whereby the last image in his memory has become the source for the whole poem. It is clear that he is aware of his intention for the scene he describes “to stay” in poetry forever, i.e., to become immortalized. It seems that he achieved his grand aim, since a century later we are reading and admiring it.

Finally, in “I Brought to Art,” he describes in more detail how he transforms into poetry his longings, feelings, and unfulfilled loves with “half-glimpsed faces”:

I Brought to Art

I sit lost in reverie. Desires and sensations
I brought to Art — some half-glimpsed
faces or lines; some vague memories
of unfulfilled affairs. Let Her take control.
She knows how to give Form to Beauty
almost imperceptibly fulfilling our life
by threading together our impressions, our days.

I would dare say that this last poem could very well serve as the epitaph on Cavafy’s tombstone, since he describes, well … what he brought to Art!

In a sense, Cavafy better typifies somebody living simultaneously in two very well-defined and separate lives than our previous two examples. Despite the aforementioned activities unrelated to physics and music, respectively, Newton and Beethoven each enjoyed a main vocation and highway that was also their actual job. Cavafy’s actual job that earned him his daily bread was being a clerk at the British-run Egyptian Ministry of Public Works. He worked there for a total of thirty years. So he must have been more conscious of his two lives — that of the clerk and that of the poet — than most other people, and this may have led him to study even more carefully the mundane elements of his life that did not belong to his main highway. His relentless struggle to transform the ordinary daily occurrences of life into extraordinary poetry is a testament to what is possible when following this middle Way.

But all of us have the ability to follow this path, and we can never know the success we might find from harmonizing our two lives unless we consciously choose it.

7

The literal Greek rendering of this first line, “It must have been one o’clock at night or half past one,” sounds a bit awkward to the native English speaker. Instead, I chose to give the meaning Cavafy intended by using an earlier draft of the poem, which sounds more poetic in English. In this version, the sentence in Greek is literally “It was at least one after midnight.”

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The above is the first chapter of my book, Conversing with Cavafy – Reflections on the Journey of Our Life.

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“Whom the gods would destroy, they first make proud.” (Ancient Greek proverb)

“Hubris, when it blooms, bears a grain-head of ruinous folly, from which it reaps an all-weeping harvest.” (Aeschylus)

Chaining the Sea

A sudden storm rose over the Hellespont strait and smashed to pieces the immense bridge that had just been thrown across its waters. The cables snapped, the planks splintered, and the long chain of ships broke apart under the force of wind and current. What had taken weeks of meticulous engineering vanished in a single day. For the man who had ordered the crossing, the destruction was not an accident of nature but a personal insult delivered by an inferior entity – the sea. Xerxes I, King of Kings, lord of the Persian Empire, master of fifty nations, responded accordingly. He commanded that the sea itself be punished by whipping it as if it were a rebellious slave who had dared to resist its master. As they lashed the sea, his men shouted: “You hateful water, your master lays this punishment upon you. King Xerxes will cross you whether you wish it or not!” Herodotus tells us that Xerxes also ordered his men to heat branding irons and plunge them into the water and throw a pair of fetters – shackles, iron chains – into the sea. Each punishment was precise and deliberate: The whipping was what you gave a disobedient slave; the branding was how you marked something as your property; the chains were how you declared a defeated people subjugated. In other words, Xerxes was enslaving the sea as if it were a rebellious subject who had defied his will and now needed to be put in irons! These preposterous acts were not merely theatrical. They were the actions of a man who genuinely could not conceive of a limit to his authority – who had confused his imperial power with cosmic power.

It is one of the most astonishing passages in all of Herodotus’s writings, shocking the reader even today, twenty-five centuries later. The great historian shows us everything we need to know about the arrogance of power: its rage at being resisted, its need to humiliate what it cannot control, and its irrational confusion between dominion over men and dominion over the order of the world itself.

In the end, the engineers rebuilt the bridge, and Xerxes crossed the Hellespont to march through Greece with the largest army the ancient world had ever seen – estimates range from two hundred thousand to over a million men, drawn from every corner of the empire, from Egypt to India. His aim was to punish Athens and avenge his father Darius’s defeat at the Battle of Marathon a decade earlier. Xerxes had inherited both the empire and the unfinished business. At the narrow pass of Thermopylae, a few thousand Greeks alongside three hundred Spartans under King Leonidas held his entire army at bay for three days until they died to the last man and became immortal. Marching on, Xerxes entered Athens and found it empty – the population had evacuated on the advice of their general Themistocles. He burned the temples on the Acropolis and the whole city. But he still had to face the Greek fleet at the straits of Salamis, the narrow channel between the island and the Athenian coast. Themistocles had lured the massive Persian fleet there, into waters too confined for its size to have an advantage. The Greek triremes, lighter and more maneuverable, rammed the Persian ships in the cramped strait where they could neither deploy nor retreat. Xerxes, expecting triumph, watched from a golden throne on the hillside above as his ships burned and his men drowned.

The sea, as it turned out, had the last word!

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“Whom the gods would destroy, they first make proud.” (Ancient Greek proverb)

“Hubris, when it blooms, bears a grain-head of ruinous folly, from which it reaps an all-weeping harvest.” (Aeschylus)

Chaining the Sea

A sudden storm rose over the Hellespont strait and smashed to pieces the immense bridge that had just been thrown across its waters. The cables snapped, the planks splintered, and the long chain of ships broke apart under the force of wind and current. What had taken weeks of meticulous engineering vanished in a single day. For the man who had ordered the crossing, the destruction was not an accident of nature but a personal insult delivered by an inferior entity – the sea. Xerxes I, King of Kings, lord of the Persian Empire, master of fifty nations, responded accordingly. He commanded that the sea itself be punished by whipping it as if it were a rebellious slave who had dared to resist its master. As they lashed the sea, his men shouted: “You hateful water, your master lays this punishment upon you. King Xerxes will cross you whether you wish it or not!” Herodotus tells us that Xerxes also ordered his men to heat branding irons and plunge them into the water and throw a pair of fetters – shackles, iron chains – into the sea. Each punishment was precise and deliberate: The whipping was what you gave a disobedient slave; the branding was how you marked something as your property; the chains were how you declared a defeated people subjugated. In other words, Xerxes was enslaving the sea as if it were a rebellious subject who had defied his will and now needed to be put in irons! These preposterous acts were not merely theatrical. They were the actions of a man who genuinely could not conceive of a limit to his authority – who had confused his imperial power with cosmic power.

It is one of the most astonishing passages in all of Herodotus’s writings, shocking the reader even today, twenty-five centuries later. The great historian shows us everything we need to know about the arrogance of power: its rage at being resisted, its need to humiliate what it cannot control, and its irrational confusion between dominion over men and dominion over the order of the world itself.

In the end, the engineers rebuilt the bridge, and Xerxes crossed the Hellespont to march through Greece with the largest army the ancient world had ever seen – estimates range from two hundred thousand to over a million men, drawn from every corner of the empire, from Egypt to India. His aim was to punish Athens and avenge his father Darius’s defeat at the Battle of Marathon a decade earlier. Xerxes had inherited both the empire and the unfinished business. At the narrow pass of Thermopylae, a few thousand Greeks alongside three hundred Spartans under King Leonidas held his entire army at bay for three days until they died to the last man and became immortal. Marching on, Xerxes entered Athens and found it empty – the population had evacuated on the advice of their general Themistocles. He burned the temples on the Acropolis and the whole city. But he still had to face the Greek fleet at the straits of Salamis, the narrow channel between the island and the Athenian coast. Themistocles had lured the massive Persian fleet there, into waters too confined for its size to have an advantage. The Greek triremes, lighter and more maneuverable, rammed the Persian ships in the cramped strait where they could neither deploy nor retreat. Xerxes, expecting triumph, watched from a golden throne on the hillside above as his ships burned and his men drowned.

The sea, as it turned out, had the last word!

Hubris

As I witness the unprovoked war of aggression of the US and Israel against Iran, I cannot help but be reminded of Xerxes’s catastrophic expedition and one of History’s favorite lessons: a lesson that it has been teaching repeatedly for twenty-five centuries to anyone willing to listen. Unfortunately, almost nobody listens. The lesson is this:

Power that does not acknowledge its limits does not merely fail. It leads to catastrophe.

The Greeks had a name for this: hubris – the overweening pride that blinds the powerful to the limits of their power. Hubris is the arrogance of power that crosses the boundary between mortal and divine. It is the violation of limits set by Nature and by the moral and Divine Order. It is the intoxication of power at its most absolute: the moment when pride comes to believe that there is no limit to its actions.

Ironically, today’s hubris, which reminds us of Xerxes’s hubris 2,500 years ago, is not committed by the Persians but by those attacking them! On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel went to war against Iran. It was an undeclared war of surprise, of “shock and awe.” On the first day, they murdered in cold blood Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, in his own home together with his wife and other members of his family including his fourteen-month-old granddaughter – a war crime in its own right. The Ayatollah also happened to be the spiritual leader of 200 million Shia Muslims scattered around the world – the aggressors’ act was the equivalent of killing the Pope and his close relatives in the Vatican! This is the first time in history that a country has targeted and killed an enemy’s leader in his own home without declaring war – something that followed another first, the abduction of the leader of a sovereign country, Nicolás Maduro. The Americans also hit (by mistake) an elementary school, killing 175 people, most of them schoolgirls. The reasons given by the two aggressor countries for starting this war have since been changing every day, if not every hour. You see, hubris need not explain itself. Its nature is pure unbounded arrogance, its tone is contempt for rules and ethical conduct, its voice is that of Xerxes’s soldiers lashing the sea! Only now, this voice is not addressing the sea with malice and scorn, but a whole nation of 93 million people. Trump’s and the Secretary of War Hegseth’s statements and tweets are an affront to human civilization in general and to human language in particular: “We have decimated their forces and their leaders have been wiped from the face of the earth”; “we are in a position of dominance that nobody has seen before”; “we’re going … to raze their missile industry to the ground – it will be totally obliterated”; “we’re going to annihilate their navy”; “watch what happens to these deranged scumbags today”; “they’ve gone underground, that’s what rats do”; “we may hit it [Kharg Island] a few more times just for fun”; “they’ve been killing innocent people all over the world for 47 years, and now I, as the 47th President of the United States of America, am killing them. What a great honor it is to do so!” An honor to kill people! This is not the language of a state leader. It is not even the language of war. It is the language of men intoxicated by power who are confusing military strength with omnipotence, cruelty with justice, and murder with honor. They do not simply destroy, they “dominate,” “decimate,” “raze to the ground,” “obliterate,” “annihilate.” It is the first time in the modern era that such words are being used by an American president and his entourage. George Bush, when he invaded Iraq twenty-three years ago, talked of “bringing freedom,” “liberating the Iraqi people,” “defeating terror.” Of course, all these were lies or wishful thinking at best, but they never diminished or insulted the enemy. The new superlatives used today, characteristic of hypermasculine infatuation with dominance and control, are an expression of the psychological state of leaders intoxicated by unbounded power. It is modern day hubris to the Nth degree. As the repercussions of such a stance unfold, they point to an imminent catastrophe.

The vernacular of Trump and Hegseth brings us to another aspect of hubris, addressed by Aristotle, who was the first to formally define the term. Hubris, according to him, is the inflicting of suffering upon the other for the sole pleasure of it. In other words, hubris is inherently sadistic! Here’s his full definition (my composite version from different translations):

Hubris consists in doing and saying things that cause shame to the victim, not in order that anything may happen to yourself, or because anything has happened to yourself, but simply for your own gratification. For those who get even with someone are not guilty of hubris, but rather of retaliation. The cause of the pleasure felt by those committing hubris, though, is the thought that in ill-treating others, they are more fully showing their superiority. That is why young people and rich people are prone to hubris – they think that by committing it, they are superior.

Aristotle, 2,400 years ago, was basically describing precisely what Trump and Hegseth are doing today! The “deranged scumbags,” the “rats,” the “honor to kill them,” and the most relevant to the Aristotelian definition, the boast of doing it “for fun” – none of these serve any military or strategic purpose. They do not make the bombs more accurate nor lead to victory. They serve no purpose other than flaunting their superiority over a suffering adversary. These phrases are uttered with malignant pleasure that is augmented by the public performance itself. It is the epitome of deriving gratification from a feeling of superiority. Interestingly, Aristotle observes that hubris flourishes most in those who are young or wealthy, i.e., those who have never been made to feel small themselves. Hegseth is a privileged and relatively young man, and Trump is a wealthy one who has lived a life of ease and privilege – and who often behaves like a child.

The first and probably still the best rendering of the lesson that hubris leads to catastrophe was, yet again, given by an Ancient Greek: the playwright Aeschylus, in The Persians, which was staged in Athens in 472 BCE – just eight years after Xerxes’s defeat at Salamis. It is the oldest surviving Greek tragedy and one of the most revolutionary works in the history of literature: Despite writing for a Greek audience still raw from war, Aeschylus chose to tell the story from the side of the defeated! The setting is not Athens but Susa, the Persian capital. The characters are not Greek heroes but Persian elders, a Persian queen, a Persian messenger arriving with the bad news. The chorus mourns the defeat of King Xerxes in Greece. Aeschylus had fought at the naval battle of Salamis and had seen the Persian ships burn. He knew firsthand what victory looked like, yet he chose, with full deliberation, to show his audience what it looked like from the other shore. The highlight of the tragedy is when Darius, Xerxes’s father, summoned back from the underworld by the incantations of the Chorus and the grief of his widow, addresses what his son has done. He does not mourn or rage. He simply explains with the clarity of one who no longer has anything to lose. He pronounces what the living are too frightened or too proud to speak aloud: Xerxes committed hubris and was punished for it. He utters the following eight lines that have outlasted his dynasty, his civilization, and every defeated army of superior force that has marched since:

Hubris, when it blooms, bears a grain-head of ruinous folly
from which it reaps an all-weeping harvest.
Beholdiing such punishments as these,
remember Greece and Athens.
Let no man, in his contempt for this present fortune,
through lust for more, squander great prosperity.
Zeus, I tell you, is the chastener of overboastful minds,
a heavy corrector.

(Smyth/Loeb trans. [1927], apart from the first two lines, which are my translation.)

There is actually a hidden tragic irony in the above passage that goes unnoticed: The wise ghost of Darius is in a position to talk about hubris because he too was guilty of it! Actually, he was more guilty than his son, because he had failed to teach him the lesson of hubris while he was alive! As a result, Xerxes ended up following the same ruinous path as his father.

Nemesis

So let us backtrack for a moment to Darius’s expedition. The incident we are about to describe, although not as well-known as Xerxes’s lashing of the sea (since it was not mentioned by Herodotus), is one of the most didactic in all of history, and introduces us to another great concept of the Greek moral universe: Nemesis – the goddess who reaps what hubris sows. When, in 490 BCE, the Persian army sent by Darius landed at Marathon, its commanders were so certain of victory that they brought with them a block of magnificent Parian marble – the finest stone in the Greek world – to carve into a victory trophy on the spot, before the battle had even been fought. When they suffered one of the most devastating defeats in ancient history, the marble was left abandoned on the shore. The Athenians collected it and gave it to the sculptor Agorakritos – a pupil of the great Pheidias, the master sculptor of the Parthenon – who was himself a native of Paros, the very island from which the marble had been brought. Agorakritos carved it into a four-meter-high statue of the goddess Nemesis – colossal by Greek standards. He portrayed her as a standing female figure of severe, majestic beauty – not terrifying, not vengeful in expression, but calm. (Varro, a Roman scholar of the first century CE, considered it “superior to every other statue.”) He then placed her in the sanctuary of the temple of Nemesis at Rhamnus, only a few miles from the battlefield where the Persian hubris had met its divine reckoning.

The stone the Persians brought to celebrate their certain triumph became the body of the goddess who punished their certainty!

There is no more perfect image of the hubris-Nemesis dynamic in all of antiquity: The arrogant certainty of victory, the goddess whose entire existence is the punishment of that certainty, the marble, the sculptor’s origins, and her nearby temple – all converged in a single place and act. It was not a mere convergence of circumstance. It was timeless Meaning made permanent in stone.

But why does hubris lead to catastrophe? And how does it relate to Nemesis? And what exactly is the mechanism by which this is brought about?

Cosmic Law

The Greeks understood the whole process as a precise sequence. The starting point is not hubris but Koros, or abundance: the dangerous condition of having too much for too long – too much wealth, too much power, too much good fortune. Koros produces hubris. Hubris then attracts Atē, the divinely administered blindness that clouds judgment and makes the powerful man incapable of correctly reading his own situation. We first encounter Atē in Homer’s Iliad, where she is the daughter of Zeus and the blinder of all men. Atē is not yet ruin – it is the blindness of the powerful that makes their ruin inevitable (the “ruinous folly” in Aeschylus’s first line above). If hubris is the moral failing that offends the gods, Atē is the blindness that inevitably leads to the real-life catastrophe. Then comes the goddess Nemesis, bearing the final reckoning. She does not impose punishment from above but rather delivers the correction that the sequence has been building towards. She is both the principle and its execution, the law and its enforcement. Atē has already led the hubristic man to the place where Nemesis is waiting. She is simply the correction that grows from the seed of arrogance – Aeschylus’s all-weeping harvest of the hubris that bloomed and Atē ripened. The whole sequence is described with astonishing economy in the first two lines of Aeschylus!

It must be emphasized, though, that this sequence is not a moral fable. It is a cosmic law – as reliable, the Greeks believed, as the harvest that follows the sowing. The progression is interesting: The further along the sequence we go, the more divine the force becomes. Koros is almost human – it is simply your own prosperity. Hubris is entirely human – it is your arrogant behavior. Atē is the first point of divine intervention, since she is sent by Zeus to cloud your judgment. And Nemesis is fully divine, the goddess who stands at the end of the sequence, waiting to deliver the ruin hubris made inevitable. (Because Atē and Nemesis are goddesses they are capitalized.)

A generation after Herodotus, another Greek historian, Thucydides, took up the same theme. An Athenian general who had lived through the catastrophic Peloponnesian War, he documented it in exhaustive detail. The most famous part of his History of the Peloponnesian War is not an expedition or a battle, but a dialogue! The mighty Athens had sent envoys to the small island of Melos, a Spartan colony that had tried to remain neutral. The Athenians demanded submission, but when the Melians appealed to justice and to their right to decide their own fate, the Athenians responded with a ruthlessness that has echoed across the centuries: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” The Melians warned that abandoning justice would eventually rebound against Athens itself, but the Athenians dismissed the warning, besieged the island, killed all the men, and enslaved the women and children. But that very arrogance that allowed Athens to dismiss the Melians’ warning is the same that, within a year, drove Athens to launch an enormous fleet to capture Sicily – not out of strategic necessity but out of pure ambition, out of the belief that Athenian power was without limit. The Athenian fleet was destroyed, its army annihilated, and thousands of Athenians were left to die in the stone quarries of Syracuse. Athens never recovered from that catastrophe and surrendered to its archenemy Sparta a decade later. A great power was destroyed not by external factors but by the hubris that would not permit it to recognize the limits of its power.

One thinks, reading the Melian Dialogue, of the planners of the US–Israeli Operation Epic Fury – a name that alone is full of pride and arrogance. A week into the operation, Trump, emulating the Athenians in Melos, posted: “There will be no deal with Iran, except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” By capitalizing the two words, he ensured they stood out as a stark, uncompromising demand from which he would never backtrack. The amoral ruthlessness is all the more glaring when you take into account the fact that the US attacked Iran while peace negotiations were under way, which, according to neutral parties involved, were very promising. Trump’s message was the Athenian message in modern form: “We are strong; we decide when to negotiate and when to bomb. Submit now or suffer more.” But the Iranians, a nation of 93 million people, with a 2,700-year-old civilization (one of only three continuous civilizations, together with India and China, that have lasted for millennia in the same geographical location), is no small Aegean island. When a week later the Iranians showed they would fight back, Trump backtracked and has not reissued the same call.

This was not the first time the world has witnessed such naked arrogance from the current American administration. A year earlier, on February 28, 2025, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had come to the White House seeking American support against Russia’s invasion of his country. Instead of a meeting between allies, what the world watched on live television was a staged humiliation: Trump and his Vice President Vance berating, interrupting, and lecturing the leader of a country fighting for its survival, complaining that he was “not grateful enough.” In the course of the exchange, a visibly shaken but unbowed Zelensky offered a warning that went largely unnoticed at the time: that the oceans would not shield America forever. Well, his ominous warning, although ridiculed by Trump at the time, seems to be turning into reality. Not because the Iranians have crossed the Atlantic to reach the US but because the US has crossed the oceans to the other end of the world to enmesh itself in a war of choice that may well lead to catastrophe. Well, oracles are always ambivalent by nature!

Ever since the Ancient Greeks described this cosmic law, defined the terms of the equation, and observed the pattern of its manifestation in real life and especially in historical events, History has validated it throughout the centuries and way beyond the borders of the limited geography of the then-known world. We could cite many examples where hubris has led to catastrophe, but let us concentrate on the last two centuries.

Bataille Décisive

When Napoleon crossed into Russia in June of 1812 with 600,000 soldiers – the largest army ever assembled up to that moment in European history – he expected a decisive battle that would end within four weeks. He was at the height of his power. He had already beaten the Russians at Austerlitz in 1805 and Friedland in 1807 and had come to regard them as strategically unsophisticated. His entire military doctrine was built on the bataille décisive: Ulm had fallen in two weeks, Jena in three, Wagram in six. He saw no reason why Russia should be any different. But this time, the Russians declined to fight on his terms, retreating and burning everything in their path. By the time Napoleon entered a deserted, burning Moscow, he had already lost three quarters of his army to the heat, disease, and starvation. When the brutal Russian winter struck as his army retreated, it decimated an already broken army, without winter clothing, supplies, or horses. Half a million men perished – the greatest loss of life in a single military expedition the world had ever seen.

But nobody ever seems to learn the lesson. On June 22, 1941 – exactly 129 years after Napoleon crossed into Russia – Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the largest military campaign in human history: over 3,000,000 troops and 3,400 tanks across a 2,900-kilometer front. Like Napoleon, he predicted the campaign would last six to eight weeks. The Soviet state was, in his famous words, “a colossus with feet of clay” that would collapse at the first serious blow. His generals had reservations. He dismissed them – as he had dismissed conventional wisdom before and happened to be right. Yet again, like Napoleon, his past record of success was the very mechanism of his destruction. Atē, the ruinous folly, had just appeared. The advance was initially spectacular. Then it stalled. Then the Russian winter arrived – for which no winter gear and equipment had been prepared. Then the Soviet industrial machine, relocated to the Urals beyond German reach, began to outproduce German armaments. Four years of the most savage fighting in human history consumed an estimated twenty-seven million Soviet lives and several million German ones. Hitler died in a Berlin bunker with his country in ruins. He had not merely repeated Napoleon’s mistake; he had repeated it knowing it was Napoleon’s mistake!

What prompted Napoleon and Hitler to undertake their fateful expeditions was that they had accumulated a number of impressive prior successes. Napoleon had defeated army after army in Europe, while Hitler had conquered most of Europe within a couple of years. Therefore, everything seemed possible for them. The same has happened with Trump. He felt that he was succeeding in everything he did and that some protective destiny was guiding him. He had won the US elections for a second time, he survived two assassination attempts, he brokered a Gaza ceasefire in early 2025, he struck Iran with success in June the same year (12-Day War), and he seized Maduro and installed a government of his choosing in Venezuela. Napoleon, Hitler, and Trump’s shared certainty that Fate would continue taking their side was instrumental in guiding their actions. Such a state of overconfidence based on past success is similar to the feeling that is induced by the state of abundance (koros) which we described earlier as “having too much power and too much good fortune” – the stage that precedes hubris. In some sense, this koros functions as a form of Atē (blindness) that comes before hubris. The difference between this blindness and Atē-proper, which follows hubris, is that Atē comes in the form of a divine external force, while the koros born of overconfidence comes from one’s inner psychological state and beliefs. In all such cases, this “koros of overconfidence” becomes the main cause of hubris.

Dragons in Shallow Waters

Coming nearer to our own times, we observe a deepening of hubris. One might think that the end of both colonialism and the European empires would have ushered in a period of peaceful coexistence between the 200 or so countries of the earth. Unfortunately, a big part of the mentality that had shaped colonialism remained. Into the vacuum left by the departing European empires stepped the United States, carrying its own certainty about democracy and the conviction that its power was not merely strength but virtue. Together with the Soviet Union functioning as an opposite pole, the two nations amassed an unprecedented concentration of power. Since the US was in a more fortunate state of abundance (koros), it was the first to become prone to hubris. With its insatiable appetite for more global power and control, it came to believe that it had a say in whatever happened at every corner of the planet. When Ho Chi Minh’s forces expelled the French from Vietnam in 1954 and a communist government took power in the north, the US – gripped by the domino theory, i.e., the belief that if Vietnam fell, all of Southeast Asia would follow – saw not a nationalist revolution but an existential threat, and decided to go to war. The Geneva Accords divided Vietnam temporarily at the 17th parallel, pending reunification elections. The United States blocked those elections, knowing Ho Chi Minh would win them, and instead backed a corrupt South Vietnamese government that had no popular support. The US was not defending democracy but a client state against its own people. What followed was ten years of war, 58,000 Americans and an estimated one million Vietnamese dead, and two million more wounded. The United States dropped more bombs on Vietnam than were dropped by all sides combined in the entire Second World War.

The hubris was the belief that enough firepower, applied with enough efficiency, must eventually break the will of a people who had been fighting foreign occupiers for a thousand years – Chinese dynasties, French colonizers, Japanese occupiers. When the last American helicopter lifted off the Saigon CIA rooftop in April 1975 – an image that traveled around the world – Nemesis reaped what a decade of arrogance had sowed.

It was in 1966, at the height of the Vietnam War, that Democratic Senator William Fulbright (the same who created the worldwide Fulbright scholarships) gave a lecture whose title I borrowed for the present essay – The Arrogance of Power. He expanded his ideas in a book published later the same year. It sold four hundred thousand copies and enraged President Johnson. Fulbright’s diagnosis of American foreign policy remains one of the deepest and most eloquent ever written. The following passage feels like a modern translation of the Aeschylus lines quoted above:

Power has a way of undermining judgment, of planting delusions of grandeur in the minds of otherwise sensible people and otherwise sensible nations. The idea of being responsible for the whole world seems to have dazzled us, giving rise to what I call the arrogance of power.

Another beautiful passage applies almost verbatim to today’s American attitude towards Iran:

The cause of our difficulties in southeast Asia is not a deficiency of power but an excess of the wrong kind of power which results in a feeling of impotence when it fails to achieve its desired ends. We are still acting like boy scouts dragging reluctant old ladies across the streets they do not want to cross. We are trying to remake Vietnamese society, a task which certainly cannot be accomplished by force and which probably cannot be accomplished by any means available to outsiders. The objective may be desirable, but it is not feasible.

Ever since I read that allegory, I cannot help but think of Trump, Vance, Hegseth, Rubio, and the rest as Boy Scouts dragging reluctant old ladies across the streets and then running to their mamas to boast of their feat. Their language and mannerisms truly are those of Boy Scouts!

Fulbright concluded his lecture with the following: “Our handicap is well expressed in the pungent Chinese proverb: In shallow waters dragons become the sport of shrimps.”

Lessons Never Learned

The American dragon, not learning from its mistakes, would repeat its ruinous folly in Afghanistan and Iraq 35 years later. In Afghanistan, the original mission – destroy al-Qaeda, topple the Taliban – succeeded quickly. Kabul was captured after 28 days. It looked like the easiest war in history. But success again bred hubris. The mission expanded into nation-building, democracy promotion, and governance reform. America did not just want to defeat the Taliban; it wanted to remake Afghanistan in its own image. Did it not know that Afghanistan has defeated every foreign power that has entered it – Alexander the Great, the British twice, the Soviets?! The assumption was that American power, money, and organization could accomplish what no empire before had managed. Twenty years, $2.3 trillion, and thousands of American deaths later, the Taliban walked back into Kabul on August 15, 2021, without firing a shot. The Afghan army the US had spent two decades and $90 billion training, simply evaporated. The country reverted, overnight, to the same form of governance it had on September 10, 2001. The American dragon had become, yet again, the sport of shrimps – just like the Soviet Union a few decades earlier.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq did not merely fail. They consumed American power from the inside. The combined cost, conservatively estimated at $6 trillion (when long-term veterans’ care and interest on borrowed war debt are included), contributed to the national debt that now exceeds $34 trillion. For two decades, the wars diverted the government’s attention and resources to senseless fighting in two faraway countries where it had no legitimate interest other than the projection of power for its own sake. During this time, China diligently built the second-largest economy in the world, raised the standard of living of its citizens, modernized its cities, developed its industries, built the best trains, roads, bridges, and airports in Asia, and expanded its influence across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. American prestige suffered perhaps even more than American finances – the spectacle of the world’s sole superpower fleeing Kabul in scenes reminiscent of Saigon sent an unmistakable signal to allies and adversaries alike about the limits of American power. Domestically, the wars deepened political polarization and eroded institutional trust. The United States remains the strongest military power on earth (its defense budget still exceeds the next ten nations combined!), but military supremacy and national power are not the same thing. Exhausted by twenty years of failed wars, the US finds itself lagging in healthcare, public infrastructure, equal opportunity, and more. In the eyes of much of the rest of the world – which now, after the Greenland charade and the abandonment of Ukraine, includes even Europe – it is also morally bankrupt. Whatever its aircraft carrier count.

With its new unprovoked war of aggression against Iran, the US is repeating precisely the same mistakes that have led it to catastrophe throughout its modern history. The parallels between Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Iran are astounding. They are the same mistake, repeated with the same hubris and the same Atē. In all four cases, the United States entered with overwhelming military superiority and the unshakeable conviction that force would translate into political outcomes. In all four cases, it underestimated the will of the people it was trying to subjugate. In all four cases, it had no coherent plan for what came after the bombing. In Iraq, the destruction of the state created a vacuum that led to chaos, sectarian war, and ultimately ISIS. In Afghanistan, twenty years of occupation produced nothing durable. Now, in Iran, the same architects of the same doctrine – “shock and awe,” “total dominance,” “obliteration” – are applying the same logic to a nation ten times more populous, more cohesive, and with a far deeper strategic reach than any of its predecessors. A nation that also constitutes a major continuous civilization that, throughout its long history, has contributed so much to humanity. The Atē is identical: the inability to learn, the inability to see that the other side has a will of its own, the inability to see that military supremacy and political control are not the same thing. History is not merely repeating itself. It is repeating itself while the actors insist, with assured confidence, that this time is different.

The US is tragically – for both itself and the whole world – demonstrating the same hubris and summoning the same Atē. Whether the resulting Nemesis will bring a bigger catastrophe that leads to the superpower’s final demise, history alone will soon tell. Of course, history’s record on this question is clear. It rarely rules in favor of the arrogance of power.

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By Jane Kayantas

Beyond raging wars, political conflicts, and socioeconomic disparities lies a thread that connects us all: our common humanity. We are all humans, regardless of nationality, culture, religious beliefs, or economic status. Our differences are woven together to create a giant, elaborate, beautiful tapestry that is humanity – our common tribe. This simple truth has been on repeat in my mind for over a week since the American-Israeli strikes on Iran shocked the world. Avoiding the messy, complicated global political arena, today I choose to focus on our common humanity and the universals that bind us together through the lens of our travels in Iran.

In 2009, Nicos and I traveled around Iran for three weeks as part of our world travels. At the time, the State Department was warning US citizens against nonessential travel there. For this and more, I was apprehensive about traveling to Iran. What if something happened to me? Would I be singled out and targeted for my American accent and mannerisms? Would I be able to blend in? When would we have this opportunity again? I was anxious yet also drawn to the unknown. Nicos, already a seasoned world-traveler, emboldened me to give it a chance and not be afraid. In the worst-case scenario, we could always change our plans and leave early.

As soon as we arrived, however, I felt a shift: Reality was very different from what I had imagined. On the morning of my first day in Tehran, I went to a shop to buy a “manteau” or an overcoat because I didn’t want to wear a chador. All women must cover their bodies and hair, so this purchase was a requirement. Donning my new manteau, we walked about the city, not knowing what to expect. And suddenly, the ordinary smacked us in the face! A modern busy city with its normal life unfolded before us: the hustle and bustle of cars and motorbikes, people rushing about their business, sellers hawking their fresh fruit, older men having tea at the local cafes. With its many 1970s buildings, Tehran actually reminded me of Athens. Feeling I was in familiar territory, all my initial fears dissipated. …

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By Jane Kayantas

Beyond raging wars, political conflicts, and socioeconomic disparities lies a thread that connects us all: our common humanity. We are all humans, regardless of nationality, culture, religious beliefs, or economic status. Our differences are woven together to create a giant, elaborate, beautiful tapestry that is humanity – our common tribe. This simple truth has been on repeat in my mind for over a week since the American-Israeli strikes on Iran shocked the world. Avoiding the messy, complicated global political arena, today I choose to focus on our common humanity and the universals that bind us together through the lens of our travels in Iran.

In 2009, Nicos and I traveled around Iran for three weeks as part of our world travels. At the time, the State Department was warning US citizens against nonessential travel there. Our cultural travels and exploration were definitely “nonessential.” For this and more, I was apprehensive about traveling to Iran. What if something happened to me? Would I be singled out and targeted for my American accent and mannerisms? Would I be able to blend in? On the other hand, when would we have this opportunity again? I was anxious yet also drawn to the unknown. Nicos, already a seasoned world-traveler, emboldened me to give it a chance and not be afraid. In the worst-case scenario, we could always change our plans and leave early.

As soon as we arrived, however, I felt a shift: Reality was very different from what I had imagined. On the morning of my first day in Tehran, I went to a shop to buy a “manteau” or an overcoat because I didn’t want to wear a chador. All women must cover their bodies and hair, so this purchase was a requirement. Donning my new manteau, we walked about the city, not knowing what to expect. And suddenly, the ordinary smacked us in the face! A modern busy city with its normal life unfolded before us: the hustle and bustle of cars and motorbikes, people rushing about their business, sellers hawking their fresh fruit, older men having tea at the local cafes. With its many 1970s buildings, Tehran actually reminded me of Athens. Feeling I was in familiar territory, all my initial fears dissipated. Gradually, I started observing many details I had not expected: the colorful manteaus many women wore that contrasted with the long billowy black chadors the Western media tend to show; their perfectly made-up faces framed by stylish headscarves that were often pulled back so that passersby could just peek at their coiffed hair; the men who walked hand in hand – a sign of friendship, not romance.

Leaving Tehran, our preconceived notions of the country faded bit by bit. The Islamic Republic was surprisingly secular. Yes, the muezzin’s call to prayer was heard five times a day, but not everyone rushed to the mosques to pray. Many Iranians just went about their normal activities. We also noticed a lot of wealth, attested by many fancy European cars on the roads and well-heeled Iranians in urban centers. The Western sanctions had stung the economy, but they certainly hadn’t destroyed it. Iran was also much larger than we had imagined. Seven times the size of the UK, Iran’s rugged mountains and extensive deserts seemed endless.

Traveling by car through the monotonous, barren landscape, we were thrilled to arrive in Kashan, an ancient city along the Silk Road, with its contrasting oasis. There, we visited historic houses with lush gardens, pools, and pavilions adorned with gorgeous geometric tiles. Strolling through Kashan’s old bazaar, we were transported by its lively colors and spice-infused scents to Scheherazade, the mythic storyteller. A fabric seller encouraged us to visit the bazaar’s rooftop, pointing to a set of stairs that took us to the multi-domed top overlooking Kashan’s old town. What a delightful surprise! Even more impressive was the ethereal city of Esfahan with its amazing Safavid-style architecture, the expansive Naqsh-e Jahan Square, and the Bridge of 33 Arches spanning the Zayandeh River. This city is pure elegance, as showcased by the signature Isfahan silk-woven carpets with intricate designs. But my most beloved was the old town of Yazd: Its mud-brick architecture and towering badgirs (or windcatchers) – an ancient form of air-conditioning – the meandering narrow alleyways flanked by high walls to protect pedestrians from the fierce sun, and the car-free old town’s permeating silence punctuated by the giggles of elementary school girls returning home all transposed us to the Silk Road of centuries past.

When we finally reached the famous Persepolis and walked around its ancient ruins, we felt we were somehow returning to our historical home. As Greeks, Nicos and I grew up learning about the Greco-Persian wars of the fifth century BCE and Alexander’s subsequent expedition to the heart of the Persian Empire. With the impressive tombs of Darius the Great and his son Xerxes hewn in the stone cliffs near the ancient city, we reconnected with our own roots. Our magical experiences reached their peak that same evening when I read aloud excerpts from Aeschylus’s play The Persians, which depicts the grief of the Persians in the capital Susa after their defeat at the Battle of Salamis in Greece. Aeschylus chose to show the Greek victory through the emotional and psychological distress felt by the Persians, thereby arousing compassion for the defeated in his Athenian audience – a truly revolutionary undertaking at the time. Aeschylus also explored the concept of hubris – its overreach and presumption – that led to the Persians’ downfall at the hands of the Greeks. Ironically, today the roles are reversed: It is the United States that risks hubris through its aggressive stance toward Iran.

Yet still, the country’s cities and sites, however interesting and enchanting, paled in comparison to the experiences we had with the people of Iran. We have never before nor since met more hospitable, open-hearted, friendly, and helpful people than the Persians. Almost everyone we encountered and briefly conversed with, in the streets or in shops, invited us for tea or welcomed us into their home for dinner. These were spontaneous, heartfelt invitations from strangers who really wanted to host us – not just to create a stronger bond with us, but also to learn about both our culture and our travels. Their genuine inquisitiveness and eagerness to make us feel at home was extremely moving.

A few scenes that stand out: In Tehran, we spent an afternoon at a cafe with university students, trading stories about our own university days and our recent travels in the Far East. Our conversation touched upon countless subjects, including the sanctions against Iran and the sincere longing for change that these students shared. Our tour guide, Ehsan from Esfahan, introduced us to the centuries-old Zurkhane (“house of power”), a traditional gym where men perform ritual exercises to the rhythmic beat of a musician’s drum and chanted verses from Hafez, Rumi, and Ferdowsi. Beautiful Zahra and her lovely teenage daughter, Yasmin, whom we met on a long train ride to Yazd, invited us to their home for dinner. A day later, we found ourselves sitting on a beautiful Persian carpet in the middle of their living room, feasting on kebabs, laughing and chatting until midnight.

Religious and cultural differences fell away as we connected on a human level and experienced what Nicos calls, in his book Destination Earth, the feeling of Universal Belonging. The more locals we encountered in our day-to-day travels, the more Iran ceased to be an abstract mental concept. Gradually, it became identical with the beautiful heart and soul of its people – each with a name, a story, a cherished memory. This excerpt from Nicos’s book is most pertinent:

There is an invisible connecting thread that goes through each one of us like a string through beaded pearls. Behind the masks, titles, and clothes we all wear, there’s a naked human body with functions we all have in common. There’s a human mind, emotions, and a human will that moves us. There are our common daily concerns, dreams, loves, and fears. By removing every surface mask, I feel I can communicate in depth with every human being. The human stare, the smile, the gestures, in spite of their infinite variations and quirks, belong to the common library of our shared humanity – to which each and every one of us has access and can read and understand.

Over the past week, I’ve been reconnecting to these vivid memories from our travels in Iran and thinking about the concept of universal belonging. I now follow the media updates with the strikes in Iran and the counterstrikes in Israel, in Lebanon, in the Gulf countries, and I suffer. I suffer for everyone involved, feeling connected with them through our common humanity: I am the suffering parents of the 165 schoolgirls who were killed in Minab. I am my friend’s Faranak’s cousin, living in Tehran, scared to death about a strike hitting my house. I am the newly displaced refugee in Beirut, fighting traffic jams to reach a safe place. I am part of a family fleeing to safety to hide in the underground shelters in Tel Aviv. I am next to my friend Leila and her husband Abdullatif in Bahrain, anxiously worried with every wailing siren in Manama. I am the petrified tourist who finally made it to Dubai only to shelter in my hotel, frantically searching for a way back home. I am them. They are me. We are one.

I leave you with an excellent short travel film about Iran (under the title above) produced for public television by Rick Steves, the most influential American travel writer and tour guide. In 2008, a year before our own trip, he had visited Iran to learn about its people and culture. He wanted to discover and experience Iran, often demonized by Western media, on his own terms. His experiences paralleled ours. He too left feeling mesmerized by a society that is so far from its misaligned portrayals in the Western media. Hope this video awakens the feeling of Universal Brotherhood.

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There are so many things I could write about Volodymyr Zelensky. I could devote an entire book to tracing his improbable ascent and transformation from television comedian to wartime president, examining the way he reenergized if not redefined Ukrainian national identity, analyzing his diplomatic agility in holding together a fragile Western coalition, presenting his moral virtues and unsurpassed statesmanship. Yet even if I were to address all this and more, I still feel that my words would fall short. Therefore, I will not attempt it.

As to why I admire him, I could not give a better answer than New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who wrote in an op-ed two months after the Russian invasion that “the question almost answers itself.” Quoting from his excellent and penetrating piece that is as relevant and as true today as it was then:

We admire Zelensky because he models what a man should be: impressive without being imposing; confident without being cocksure; intelligent without pretending to be infallible; sincere rather than cynical; courageous not because he is fearless but because he advances with a clear conscience.

Because I hope that future professional historians will do a much better job than I in presenting Zelensky’s achievements and because there is nothing more I can add to Stephens’s op-ed to express my admiration, I have instead chosen to focus today on one aspect of Zelensky’s greatness that I have not yet seen anybody else adequately refer to. On this solemn four-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I consider this to be my modest contribution to honoring the heroic Ukrainian people through their leader.

To read the entire essay for free, please click here.

There are so many things I could write about Volodymyr Zelensky. I could devote an entire book to tracing his improbable ascent and transformation from television comedian to wartime president, examining the way he reenergized if not redefined Ukrainian national identity, analyzing his diplomatic agility in holding together a fragile Western coalition, presenting his moral virtues and unsurpassed statesmanship. Yet even if I were to address all this and more, I still feel that my words would fall short. Therefore, I will not attempt it.

As to why I admire him, I could not give a better answer than New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who wrote in an op-ed two months after the Russian invasion that “the question almost answers itself.” Quoting from his excellent and penetrating piece that is as relevant and as true today as it was then:

We admire Zelensky because he models what a man should be: impressive without being imposing; confident without being cocksure; intelligent without pretending to be infallible; sincere rather than cynical; courageous not because he is fearless but because he advances with a clear conscience.

Because I hope that future professional historians will do a much better job than I in presenting Zelensky’s achievements and because there is nothing more I can add to Stephens’s op-ed to express my admiration, I have instead chosen to focus today on one aspect of Zelensky’s greatness that I have not yet seen anybody else adequately refer to. On this solemn four-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I consider this to be my modest contribution to honoring the heroic Ukrainian people through their leader.

What I am about to address confronts us daily, yet precisely because it has become so “natural” and “normal,” we fail to see it. It now feels to us ordinary and hardly registers. Yet it is a truth that has a name and must be addressed and described:

Zelensky has ushered in a revolution in the way a leader communicates with his people.

What he has been doing every single day, unabated, for the past four years has never before happened in history. This revolution began on the second day of the invasion when he recorded his first historic selfie-style video, with his key officials standing beside him in front of the presidential building, vowing to defend their country. Just when the world’s media were trying to guess the reaction of the Ukrainian government and the whereabouts of the nation’s leadership, there appeared out of nowhere on Zelensky’s social media accounts this 32-second-long video that shocked the world. It was not the message per se that was revolutionary – the previous day had already seen an official declaration of martial law and general mobilization that signaled Ukraine would fight. No, it was not just the content, but how it was created and delivered. Here he was, for the first time in the history of humanity, the leader of a country holding a mobile phone in a completely unrehearsed, amateurish, casual manner, delivering to his people the most momentous message they would hear in their lifetime: We are here, we are not fleeing, we stand with you, and we will fight alongside you. I have watched this video innumerable times. If you notice carefully, at the beginning, Zelensky’s face is serious, but by the middle, he starts to assume a stoic smile that contains confidence and assurance and radiates hope for the future. It is the smile of a man who has fully embraced his tragic destiny.

Since that portentous moment, Zelensky has been addressing his people with a video message every day, sometimes multiple times within the same day. In the overwhelming majority of cases, his style is similar to the very first video: improvised, direct, as if addressing his friends. His video messages, sometimes filmed from his desk, sometimes from outside locations or even from the battlefield, address a variety of things: important decisions that were made that day, meetings he has had and their significance, the latest developments of the war, but also his opinions and justifications concerning all these. During these four years, of course, not every single day is full of significant events worth sharing. But this is exactly where Zelensky’s true revolution resides. When he has nothing important to announce, he transforms his messages into something else that, again, was never before done by any leader: He simply recounts what he did throughout the day, in effect sharing his daily program! Do you realize how revolutionary this is? Every single day, he reports to his people what he has done. Every Ukrainian – or any observer worldwide – knows exactly where he was and what he did throughout the day. The leader no longer descends from balconies or marble podiums but rather looks into a handheld lens and speaks in the first person. Authority is no longer staged at a ceremonial distance; it is exercised at eye level – for both the leader and his audience. In this new reality, the leader is not an occasional orator but a daily witness; not an abstract office but a visible human being who reports, explains, reassures, and endures alongside his people. The screen – traditionally a medium of entertainment – has become a conduit of civic intimacy. What began as an improvised selfie video in a darkened Kyiv street has gradually matured into a sustained practice of accountability, transforming communication from episodic proclamation into continuous presence.

We often speak about governmental transparency as an ideal to which all countries ought to strive. Yet here we have a leader who is so ruthlessly transparent that we know what he does almost every single hour of the day. A leader who practices daily accountability not through bureaucratic reports but through his own unmediated voice. He reports to his people in a fashion similar to a soldier recounting the tasks he has completed to his commanding officer at the end of the day! It is executive transparency, not as verbal policy but as realized daily behavior and habit; not as a slogan, but as lived discipline. It is radical transparency to the Nth degree.

Political analysts and historians often compare Zelensky to Churchill – both have framed their struggle in stark moral terms, have projected calm defiance, used emotional and expressive language. But did you know that Churchill gave only 49 public radio broadcasts throughout the war? Zelensky has given over 1,500! Furthermore, Churchill’s speeches projected a grand, aristocratic, rhetorically baroque style rooted in imperial self-confidence, whereas Zelensky’s daily messages embody a direct, informal style that projects immediacy and personal identification with his people. But even in his major addresses at special anniversaries, Zelensky’s language remains the same, even though his oratorial style may be elevated to more formality and the video production may be more professional – as in the inspiring yearly address on each anniversary of the invasion (click here for this year’s address and here to watch with embedded English subtitles what in my opinion is his best speech to date). Tragically and ironically, he has become a true “Servant of the People” – the title of his pre-war comedy series in which he was the protagonist-president he ended up becoming in real life! What is most remarkable is that we often consider politicians to be dishonest, secretive, inauthentic, pretentious, bad actors; yet paradoxically, the former actor Zelensky has developed the exact opposite of these traits. As if by some divine intervention of fate, he has been transformed from a good actor to someone who never acts, although he is the embodiment of Wise Action.

It’s as if the stage trained him, but history stripped him of performance!

Zelensky’s unnoticed and unspoken-of revolution is redefining modern political discourse in real time. By replacing convention and officialdom with the immediate and spontaneous, he has altered forever the language of leadership as well as its mode of presentation. Whether future leaders will emulate this model or if it will remain bound to the exceptional circumstances of war remains to be seen. But the precedent has been set. Expectations have shifted.

Zelensky has narrowed the distance between ruler and ruled and has transformed the style and form of their communication. The world cannot go back.

Slava Ukraini!

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After my last political analysis about Trump, I remembered an older essay of mine. I feel that it is even more relevant today than it was eight years ago when I first published it. I have added new arguments and points to augment it as a follow-up to my most recent Trump piece. I have also pleasantly discovered something that I did not know then: I am not alone in my unconventional views, since an American professor, Hugh LaFollette, had proposed a “license for parents” in an article 46 years ago – even though his rationale was different from mine and his proposals less radical. Therefore, I added his views, as well as significant new material and, … in Cavafy-style, re-edited the whole essay to create a new version. I kept the same title.

To drive a small scooter, one must have a driver’s license.

But to raise children or rule a country, one need have nothing!

Seen from the vantage point of a future observer living in the twenty-fifth century, our contemporary twenty-first century society will be considered primitive, not because we still have wars and kill one another for a piece of land or as a show of power, not because we destroy our environment, not because we are on the treadmill of the incessant insatiable pursuit of more material goods, but mainly because we allow people to raise children, and rulers to govern us, without their having a license to do so.

Proof of competence, ability, and expert knowledge are required for most jobs. To practice medicine, law, architecture, even to work as a plumber or a woodworker, people train for years and need to prove their competence or earn diplomas. But to become a parent or to rule a nation, qualifications are not necessary. Of course, this has been happening since the beginning of history. Society has tacitly accepted that the biological ability to procreate is sufficient enough reason to allow people to become parents and that the ability to rise to the top of the political hierarchy is sufficient proof of competence to allow one to govern cities and people, nations and countries. So here we are, 300,000 years since the appearance of Homo sapiens, and 5,000 years since the beginning of recorded history, having millions of parents unfit to do the job of raising kids and thousands of rulers who are unfit to lead us.

Yet these two jobs are the most important professions in human society. Raising a child is synonymous with creating a human being, since Man is not born but is made through upbringing (see: “The Incompleteness of Man” in my book The Eternal Ragpicker), while governing is the highest, most important job upon which human civilization is built and through which it evolves.

But what are the reasons for this state of affairs in the world?

To read the entire essay for free, please click here.

To drive a small scooter, one must have a driver’s license.

But to raise children or rule a country, one need have nothing!

Seen from the vantage point of a future observer living in the twenty-fifth century, our contemporary twenty-first century society will be considered primitive, not because we still have wars and kill one another for a piece of land or as a show of power, not because we destroy our environment, not because we are on the treadmill of the incessant insatiable pursuit of more material goods, but mainly because we allow people to raise children, and rulers to govern us, without their having a license to do so.

Proof of competence, ability, and expert knowledge are required for most jobs. To practice medicine, law, architecture, even to work as a plumber or a woodworker, people train for years and need to prove their competence or earn diplomas. But to become a parent or to rule a nation, qualifications are not necessary. Of course, this has been happening since the beginning of history. Society has tacitly accepted that the biological ability to procreate is sufficient enough reason to allow people to become parents and that the ability to rise to the top of the political hierarchy is sufficient proof of competence to allow one to govern cities and people, nations and countries. So here we are, 300,000 years since the appearance of Homo sapiens, and 5,000 years since the beginning of recorded history, having millions of parents unfit to do the job of raising kids and thousands of rulers who are unfit to lead us.

Yet these two jobs are the most important professions in human society. Raising a child is synonymous with creating a human being, since Man is not born but is made through upbringing (see: “The Incompleteness of Man” in my book The Eternal Ragpicker), while governing is the highest, most important job upon which human civilization is built and through which it evolves.

But what are the reasons for this state of affairs in the world?

Concerning the raising of children, societies have historically accepted that giving birth is synonymous with the right to raise that offspring, because they have assumed that just as we have rights over our biological body, we also have rights over the body that comes out of it. However, this is both a false premise as well as a false understanding of what the case is: It is biology, or rather Nature, that produces human beings, not a man and a woman. As Kahlil Gibran says, “Your children are not your children … They come through you but not from you.” Strictly speaking, unlike human creations, the initial biological act of conception/birth is not the outcome of any real effort or work on the part of parents, so it is irrational to credit them with either ownership or absolute control over their offspring. The act of sexual copulation cannot seriously be considered anything more than the biological pleasure-seeking function of human bodies, which, without any further effort from the side of the lovers, and with Nature running its natural course, leads to procreation. Man comes to assume the role of maker or architect of things that belong to Nature’s domain and over which Nature reigns. The assumed right to have absolute control over our children, and in a sense “own their lives,” ought not to be a given. Control over children and the right to raise them ought to be granted only to those who have shown that they can actually do the job. Parenthood ought not to be a natural right, but a given one. Just as with every other ability, skill, or profession, the right to practice parenthood ought to be earned.

And believe it or not, I think that this was the case for millennia! Across most of human history and across the majority of ethnographically documented societies, child-rearing was taken up by older people who knew many things about both rearing and life in general. Child-rearing was as a rule multigenerational, with grandparents – especially grandmothers – playing the central role in this work. Having visited a number of indigenous societies during my world travels and seeing this system in action even today from up close, this is how I understand it to have worked over the ages: The mothers, who were young and needed to work in the fields (or earlier, as gatherers) assigned the important job of their children’s rearing to their mothers and other elders (grandfathers or great aunts). While these elders were engaged in child-rearing, they were simultaneously teaching parenting skills to their daughters. So, the grandparents were simultaneously the “parents” to their grandchildren as well as the teachers of their own daughters who, upon becoming themselves one day grandparents, would be able to do the same job! The parents went through some kind of “child-rearing school” by observing and, of course also occasionally assisting, their own parents. Our Western modern nuclear family (parents and children living alone, separate from the rest of the family, in one house) is historically recent and culturally exceptional in that the mother must both work and raise kids without any prior experience or much knowledge of the subject. Since we cannot go back in time, we can at least try to emulate the philosophy of what was happening for millennia, and in modern fashion require that parents today demonstrate even better competence that the grandmothers of old.

As far as I know, there is only one contemporary philosopher who has argued in favor of what I propose here: American professor Hugh LaFollette in his influential 1980 essay “Licensing Parents.” LaFollette’s arguments are based on parenting being “a potentially harmful activity.” He proposed ways to assure that likely abusive parents (drug addicts, criminals, etc.) are not allowed to become parents. His main thesis was that such a license could be a form of guarantee against child abuse. He argued that just as driving a car, performing a surgery, or prescribing drugs (activities that may harm others) requires demonstrated competence, which is regulated by the state, something analogous must be applied to parenting. He also used the strong argument that well-entrenched laws already require adoptive parents to be vetted. Isn’t it a paradox that those who adopt must meet strict criteria, but all other parents not?! My view is that we should go beyond this minimum “do no harm” approach and be more maximalists, requiring parents to undergo proper schooling with exams and proven qualifications in order to exercise this most important profession.

Now, concerning our rulers: How does it come about that we allow so many incompetent politicians to rule us? The answer is to be found at the very beginning of political discourse. One of the phrases we often hear, which goes unnoticed because it is considered the most natural thing, is “Mr. Jones is entering politics.” Mr. Jones (or should I say Mr. Trump?!) has not been involved in politics throughout his life, he may have never managed people himself, he may know nothing of history or how the government, political life, and institutions work, he may have not read a single book in the past twenty years, but, because suddenly he feels like it, he opens some imaginary door (or … slowly descends a golden escalator!) and majestically “enters politics.” Just like that. He may be a lawyer, or an economics teacher, or a businessman, or a plumber, yet he need only make a step into nothingness – or should we say, the emptiness of politics – to “enter.” Can you imagine this happening in any other profession? Can you imagine your plumber declaring that he will “enter medicine,” and that from tomorrow he will start examining patients at home? Or an economics teacher “entering NASA” on Monday to join the mission to Mars on Tuesday? The foundations on which political discourse is based contain the most incredible assumption we all somehow hold to be true: that anybody, at anytime, anywhere, and in whatever manner, may simply decide to enter politics, and lo! next year he is your mayor or president.

But there still remains something else to be addressed: What about those who have been in politics all their lives, the “professional politicians”? Why is it that far too often, though certainly not always, they too prove unfit to rule? The explanation for this is a bit less obvious, although quite simple, and it is surprising that (as far as I know) it has not yet been explored:

The skills necessary to climb the political ladder are different from the skills necessary once you reach the top.

We may liken this to climbing to the top of a rough mountain to take photographs of the surrounding landscape. The skills necessary to climb the mountain are different from the skills required to operate the camera. Most politicians, most people who end up ruling over human affairs, have honed the skills to climb to the top of the mountain, but once there, they know not how to use the camera, while a significant number are so irresponsible that they may be likened to the photographer who discovers, once on top of the mountain, that he has forgotten to bring his camera altogether! The skills of mountain climbing and photography are distinct. Similarly, the skills to climb up the political ladder – to be a good orator, master of party intrigue and self-promotion – are different from the qualities a wise ruler must have: good overall education, vision, integrity, organizational skills, decisiveness, and more. Yet, through some sort of silent universal consent, we assume that reaching the top of a political party or winning an election automatically gives someone not just the right, but the ability to govern. History and present-day political discourse, however, strongly suggest that this assumption is not only flawed, but potentially dangerous. A very good number of ruthless conquerors, dictators, and political manipulators throughout history have shown us that gaining power is not synonymous with wise governorship. Even the seemingly fair and advanced processes of modern parliamentary democracies have demonstrated that those who win elections are better skilled at demagoguery and gaining popularity than at the governing for which they were elected. Although Socrates admonished the young and soon-to-be demagogue Alcibiades in Plato’s dialogue (of the same name) for wanting to rule over the Athenians without being equipped to do so – “equipped in the same way as a skilled cobbler is able to create shoes” – 2,500 years later, we have yet to learn the lesson that gaining power is different from wisely exerting it. The good rulers are so rare a species that the word “politician” has developed a somewhat negative connotation: It signifies the opposite of a person with the ability to govern and rule. Just as an eighteen-year-old couple (who only a year ago were legally considered children themselves!) has neither the knowledge nor the maturity to raise their newborn baby, so too is the modern-day politician involved in obtaining the skills to acquire popularity and power at the expense of the qualifications necessary to rule.

Human society is led from cradle to grave by many incompetent if not unfit parents and rulers who have assumed without any license the most important functions in human society!

Until the nineteenth century, society may have been excused for allowing such a state of affairs to persist. But ever since modern psychology turned parenting into a subject of systematic study and showed us that child-rearing is one of the most decisive forces shaping adult mental and emotional health, we cannot feign ignorance and allow people with no qualifications whatsoever to raise – and therefore, create – humans. And in a complex society with the most sophisticated universities and educational systems, it is shocking that we still allow some of the most uneducated, unequipped, untrained, unskilled, incapable people to rule over millions of others, among whom there are thousands who would have been better equipped for the job had they been chosen with the same methods and scrutiny that we demand for other professions.

Some may retort that the skills required to raise a child or to rule over people are so extensive that no syllabi, courses, or training could ever cover everything necessary for life at large, nor prepare anybody for these two jobs – that the totality of life cannot be contained in a syllabus. But this is incorrect. For the totality of any subject of knowledge cannot and is never restricted to a syllabus. No doctor knows the entire field of medicine, and no architect or engineer on his own can build the monumental Burj Khalifa in Dubai – the tallest building in the world. However, all require a minimum of education and skills before they are allowed to practice their professions. The correct concept of minimum requirement lies at the core of our whole educational system, from elementary schools to universities and technical/professional schools. Just as one is not considered literate unless one can read and write, and just as one is not considered educated unless one can add and subtract numbers and know a modicum of history and geography, biology and art, in the same way, every parent and every ruler must satisfy the minimum requirements (that hopefully our future society will establish) to be able to raise and rule.

But why be satisfied with only the minimum? Why not go even further? As it happens, I have none other than one of the greatest philosophers in history on my side, who supported exactly this: Plato was the first to make an elaborate case for the idea that rulers have to be trained for many years before they can be allowed to rule. In The Republic, he described what the ideal state should look like, and he listed the qualifications that a ruler should have. He suggested a prolonged education and probation. The aspiring ruler should first study mathematics, then astronomy, harmony, and dialectic (for a whole five years). After this well-rounded (for those times) education, he should spend another … 15 years (!) in various public offices in order to be tested under temptations and pressures. And only “at the age of fifty” those who will have survived the tests will be qualified to lead. This was a truly maximalist aspiration that goes well beyond the concept of minimum requirement. Unfortunately, then, just as now, all these proposals remained in the sphere of “the ideal” that would be applied in some future perfect City.

Remarkably, around the same time as Plato was forming these ideas, the Chinese were thinking of how to apply them in the real world! Historically, the roots of Chinese meritocracy can be traced – at least philosophically – to Confucian thought some 2,500 years ago. His philosophy emphasized moral cultivation, self-discipline, and governance by virtue rather than by force. While Confucius himself did not design a bureaucratic state, later dynasties institutionalized aspects of this worldview through the imperial civil service examination system (keju) – which aimed to select officials based on learning, ideally elevating the “worthy” and countering aristocratic privilege. This system represented one of history’s earliest attempts to formalize merit as a criterion for governance. Although it was the educated elite who ended up taking the exams, still, the competition among the educated has always been fierce. Nowadays, of course, since the majority in China has good overall education, the ideal of selecting officials by merit from the general population has become the new reality in the country. As Fudan University professor Zhang Weiwei says, “the Chinese model is more about leadership than the showmanship seen in the West.” And this “challenges the traditional dichotomy of democracy versus autocracy.” Such thinking contrasts a Confucian-style meritocracy with Western electoral democracy.

In the Chinese promotion-through-performance model, officials typically rise through the ranks by demonstrating competence in local and regional governance roles (… in Platonic style). As the venture capitalist Eric Li has argued in lectures and interviews, China’s system emphasizes long administrative careers, to the point that – by comparison – a Western leader with a résumé like Barack Obama’s prior to 2008 would lack the governing experience typically expected even of lower-level Chinese officials! Of course, the Chinese model is not without its own criticisms. Observers note that true meritocracy in China is imperfect: Factors like party loyalty, patronage, and even nepotism can influence promotions. The upper echelons of Chinese leadership remain almost exclusively male and Han Chinese. And without electoral accountability, even competent autocrats may lack checks on their power. Still, though, the results of meritocracy (or at least the effort to apply it as much as possible in all aspects of governance) can be felt in the rapid development of China over the past forty or so years. There is some hope that this philosophy for governance may come to the fore with China’s development as a mighty new power on the world stage. Modern China often serves as a real-world example of political meritocracy, offering a sharp contrast to leadership selection in Western liberal democracies.

But why should we wait for China to show us the way or for some “ideal future” to turn such an ideal into reality? The time has come to face these uncomfortable truths and start doing something about them. Let us start today with this: create a very small and simple syllabus and exam protocol (Chinese-style) to be offered in the first “Parenting Schools” and the first “Schools for Rulers.” The aim of these schools would be to ensure, at least at the very beginning, that future parents and rulers respectively will satisfy the minimum requirements of competency for their future roles – as expounded above. Nobody would be allowed to become parents without having the special license to raise children. Similarly, nobody would be allowed to enter politics before a certain age and without the proper education, training, exam results, and licenses in a number of important fields, similar to those medical doctors are beholden to. Let us create, for the first time in human history, the two most important licenses currently absent from human societies: the License to Raise and the License to Rule.

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There are historical moments when language is strained but holds. Revolutions, wars, economic collapses – each demands new vocabularies, sharper metaphors, more imaginative commentary. Yet even in those crises, writers trusted that carefully chosen words could still rise to meet reality. The present age feels different. Each headline brings a shock that defies ordinary language. To describe anything accurately today feels like minimizing it – not because the description is wrong, but because no description can do justice to the preposterousness of it all.

In the Trump era, everything I write is an understatement.

Political commentary presumes a shared scale on which we make judgements. It assumes exaggeration is possible and that outrage can be expressed in simple words that can be understood. And that this scale has an upper boundary of shock. But we have crossed this boundary. The grotesque and the unprecedented has become part of our daily routine. We are in new territory, or rather in another solar system. It feels as if we have entered a science fiction movie that introduces new elements every few minutes that we must struggle to make sense of. And as soon as we think we get it, a new parallel plot appears in some other corner of the galaxy, and then another one, each with its own last-minute twists.

In the Trump era, the common reality we all once shared has vanished.

To read this entire essay for free, please click here.

There are historical moments when language is strained but holds. Revolutions, wars, economic collapses – each demands new vocabularies, sharper metaphors, more imaginative commentary. Yet even in those crises, writers trusted that carefully chosen words could still rise to meet reality. The present age feels different. Each headline brings a shock that defies ordinary language. To describe anything accurately today feels like minimizing it – not because the description is wrong, but because no description can do justice to the preposterousness of it all.

In the Trump era, everything I write is an understatement.

Political commentary presumes a shared scale on which we make judgements. It assumes exaggeration is possible and that outrage can be expressed in simple words that can be understood. And that this scale has an upper boundary of shock. But we have crossed this boundary. The grotesque and the unprecedented has become part of our daily life. We are in new territory, or rather in another solar system. It feels as if we have entered a science fiction movie that introduces new elements every few minutes that we must struggle to make sense of. And as soon as we think we get it, a new parallel plot appears in some other corner of the galaxy, and then another one, each with its own last-minute twists.

In the Trump era, the common reality we all once shared has vanished.

And it has not been replaced by a new one that we may attempt to understand and “enter.” Political reality is shifting every day with new absurdities. Putin is welcomed in the US with a red carpet, while Zelensky (a larger-than-life figure admired by the vast majority of other world leaders) had to settle for a private visit at the president’s Palm Beach golf club, as if he were a nuisance interrupting the president’s game. Tariffs, an early twentieth century relic, have taken center stage as a weapon of revenge on those who do not cooperate with the president. The streets of American cities have been flooded with ICE agents who abruptly grab people going about their daily lives. And when people react, these agents kill, as was the case with Renée Good, an American poet, whose only crime was being in her car peacefully protesting, and last Saturday, with Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a nurse who worked in a veterans’ hospital. The president of Venezuela was abducted in the middle of the night … just because (as internal transcripts have revealed) Trump got angry that Maduro mocked him by imitating his dancing! And Denmark and Greenland were about to be invaded because the president decided he wants Greenland (or is it Iceland?!) … after he tried to convince Canada to become the USA’s 51st state! And the European countries that reacted to this were threatened with “retaliatory tariffs.” He abuses journalists nonstop, and recently he even raised his middle finger at a heckler – yes, this too has happened! Not to mention the discovery and publication of his scandalous typewritten message to Jeffrey Epstein, framed by the outline of a nude woman with Trump’s signature sketched to resemble her vagina. But the most shocking of all (oh, “shocking” … what a poor and ordinary word, yet again) was Machado handing over her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump and that disgusting photo with them posing in the Oval Office. It was no prank gift, and despite Trump’s grin, it was not a satire piece from The Onion!

And as if all these were not enough, the president tells us his thoughts in … real time. He tweets through the night, making public his every fleeting impulse and petty grievance as it arises: He attacks his opponents, he brags about his accomplishments, he reposts praise directed at himself, he amplifies fringe conspiracy theories, he provokes, bullies, vents his anger. Some psychiatrists have characterized him as a “malignant narcissist,” but let’s not go there. More recently, he even started sharing his emails and message exchanges with world leaders – private conversations that were never meant to be made public.

Failing Words

The daily hyperbole has become so ordinary that words like “dangerous,” “unprecedented,” or “norm-shattering,” which once signaled genuine alarm, now sound banal. Each new event demands a stronger adjective, but constant exaggeration erodes their force. The result is a paradox: The more extreme reality becomes, the flatter our descriptions feel. We experience outrage fatigue. When every week is described as a “constitutional crisis,” eventually nothing feels particularly crucial. The more we insist “this is not normal,” the more normal it sounds.

There is also the problem of disbelief. Even when events are described accurately, they resist assimilation into the reader’s mental model of how a democracy is supposed to function. The mind pushes back: “This cannot be happening,” “There must be more context,” “Surely the system will correct itself.” What is written feels smaller than what has occurred, because the reader’s outrage is so much stronger. A headline reads “US President Contemplates Using Force to Take Greenland” and the reflex is to treat it as hyperbole or a joke. Our inner voice adds an asterisk: “Surely he didn’t mean it literally.” But we soon discover he did! Reality has outstripped the reader’s capacity to believe, so we live in a state of semi-denial. The writer’s boldest depiction feels like an understatement because the truth itself is unbelievable. Faced with this, some writers use increasingly rising excess, hoping it will substitute persuasion. But such a strategy is already failing. Others abandon analysis altogether, opting for slogans or brief comments under various articles or in videos on TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook. Others, myself included (well, … until today!), choose to remain silent because we feel that whatever we write will be an understatement.

Perhaps the only redeeming path is simple political irony. And The Onion has taken exactly this path: It amplifies the preposterousness to its … irrational conclusion in a vain attempt to wake us up! In the following “news item,” relating to the president publicly raising his middle finger to a heckler during a recent visit at a Ford plant titled “Pundits Praise Strength, Dexterity Required for Trump to Successfully Lift Middle Finger,” we are not sure whether what is attributed to Sean Hannity is true, exactly because it sounds like something he could have said:

Lauding the commander-in-chief’s response to being heckled at a Ford plant as a stunning physical feat, pundits from multiple media outlets praised President Donald Trump on Thursday for summoning the strength and dexterity necessary to successfully lift his middle finger. “The obscene gesture Trump made in Michigan was brimming with youthful vitality, not to mention quite a bit of technical finesse,” said Fox News’ Sean Hannity, echoing the sentiment of dozens of political commentators who remarked that the 79-year-old Trump had flipped the bird with the deftness and vigor of a man half his age. “No president since Teddy Roosevelt has possessed the raw bodily prowess required not only to lift his middle finger, but also to hold it in the air – completely unassisted – for nearly a full second. Most leaders would struggle to flip someone off as effortlessly as Trump did, and none of them could pull it off while walking with such bold, muscular steps. It borders on superhuman, but that’s just the kind of athleticism you come to expect with such an incredible physical specimen leading our country.” Hannity went on to commend the mental acuity and “rapier wit” that allowed Trump to come up with a retort for the heckler as scathing as “Fuck you.”

When an Onion news item reads as plausible, it is a sign that Camus’s absurd has become America’s new reality.

Meagre Opposition

But how are all these things allowed to happen in a democracy?

Unfortunately, the US has no formal political position equivalent to a “Leader of the Opposition” as in most other democracies, because the constitutional system is presidential, not parliamentary. In parliamentary systems (e.g., the UK, France, and most of Europe), the executive emerges from the parliament, and the opposition is institutionally recognized and expected to publicly scrutinize the government. The leader of the largest nongoverning party speaks as “the opposition,” responds to government statements, and confronts the prime minister in parliament. In the US, the executive is separate from the legislature. The president is elected independently of Congress, so there is no official counterpart whose job is to oppose the government. Party leaders in Congress (Senate or House minority leaders) are legislators, not alternative heads of government, and they speak only for their caucus – not the nation. As a result, the opposition in the US is fragmented, informal, and expressed through individual press statements, congressional hearings, and personal activism rather than as an institutional process. Therefore, the role of the “opposition” is taken up by only a handful of senators and governors, most prominently these days by Gavin Newsom, Adam Schiff, and the tireless 84-year-old Bernie Sanders.

Flooding the Zone with Shit

But all these events hitting us simultaneously, although apparently random and chaotic, are actually based on the philosophy of “flooding the system,” whose father is none other than the political operative Steve Bannon, the architect of Trump’s first term election victory. According to him, since there is no political opposition in the US (as explained above), so the real opposition is the media, and the best strategy to fight them is to launch multiple storylines or controversies rapidly so that outlets – and therefore public attention – never settle long enough on any one issue to scrutinize it closely.

This is what he had to say about it in a 2018 interview with Michael Lewis:

The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit! All we have to do is “flood the zone.” Every day we hit them with three things, they’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. They’ll never be able to recover.

The goal is to launch so many storylines that journalists and citizens never focus long enough on any one of them. One outrageous statement or scandal dominates the news cycle, pushing the last one off the front page, and before the new one sinks in, another has replaced it. And here you have it: shit hitting the fan every single day so nobody can get a hold on any of it!

Trump’s continual lying is so off the charts that it has become tragicomic. In last week’s 70-minute-long rambling speech in Davos, he spit out so many lies that even the prestigious BBC felt it had to debunk, well, some of the shit: The US used to own Greenland and it gave it back to Denmark after WWII (completely made up); China has no wind farms (China generates more wind energy than any other country – its largest wind farm in Gansu can actually be seen from space!); the US gets nothing back from NATO (the US is actually the only country ever to invoke Article 5 of the alliance, requesting that all countries help it after the 9/11 attacks). In that same speech, Trump taunted the US allies about World War II, saying that “without us, right now you’d all be speaking German and a little Japanese perhaps” – thus spake in … German-speaking Davos! Nobody ever told him that the Soviet Union had by far the largest contribution to the victory of the Allied forces in WWII – they lost 7.5 million soldiers whereas the US “only” lost 400,000.

Probably the pinnacle of Trump’s utter ahistoricity (struggling with the creation of new words here, inspired from the Greek – ανιστόρητος!) was in 2019 when he said that the Continental Army took over airports during the American Revolution (in the … eighteenth century)! I wonder if he has ever read a single book in his life.

Oversized Baby

Well, shit points to diapers and babies, who often play with shit (as I too once did according to my mom!). Trump’s childish behavior often reminds me of the oversized infant in the Cirque du Soleil show Mystère that I happened to see on three separate occasions in Las Vegas. In Mystère, an infant, who is played by an adult, is the protagonist of the show and enters multiple times to disrupt the stage with comedic skits. The infant adult enters the stage holding a giant ball while waddling, throwing tantrums, and demanding attention. It is noisy, gluttonous, erratic, needy, self-absorbed, and uncontainable. Trump’s behavior is similarly inflated, impulsive, performative, repetitive. Like the overgrown baby, he interrupts processes, derails conversations, tramples norms, and substitutes noise for conversation. His tweets function like tantrums: loud, provocative, attention-seeking. Trump’s refusal to “mature” is reframed by his supporters as authenticity; his lack of self-control supposedly shows strength; his infantile repetitions (“many people are saying,” “tremendous,” “fake news”) are deemed political emphasis. And of course, for the time being, just as a baby, he is never held responsible. His excesses and verbal outbursts are framed as “his personal style,” not a failure of character.

In both cases, caretakers emerge – “handlers” who rush in to interpret the cries as intentions and the tantrums as strategy. One of the most shocking things we have witnessed was in the recent meeting with top oil and gas executives at the White House – gathered to discuss the exploitation of Venezuela’s oil reserves, which in itself was something out of Orwell’s 1984. At some moment, Trump’s attention wavered. He walked to the window, pressed close to the glass, and began commenting on the construction site outside – where he is proudly creating a giant gilded ballroom in the East Wing. Upon returning to the desk, Marco Rubio discreetly handed him a handwritten note on a small paper in an attempt to re-anchor the meeting. Trump took the note, glanced at it, and then read it aloud, word for word, to a room full of cameras. There was no awareness that the note was meant to be private. Or maybe there was and he simply wanted to make the statement that he doesn’t give a damn about anything!

Rubio belongs to a group of handlers in Trump’s inner circle. He, and a few others, try to rein him in by constraining his excesses. But they fail, because these secretaries and advisors were selected especially for their weakness and lack of personality. They also depend entirely on his favor. The moment they contradict, correct, or slow him down, they risk public humiliation or dismissal. Therefore, his handlers operate after the fact, attempting to clean up his statements and reinterpret what he meant after the damage is already done. When a toddler makes a mess, the parents clean it up, but here the mess is real policy with real-life consequences. As a result, what is playful on the Mystère stage turns destructive when the state becomes one huge Trump nursery.

Unfortunately, European leaders too have been behaving as handlers for a year now. They are disgracefully using flattery, reframing Trump statements as jokes or simply bypassing them and concentrating only on what they agree with. Their damage control during conferences is often beyond embarrassing (another understatement). They see the erratic behavior, the utter aberration of political norms, but they refuse to accept how much things have changed. Probably the most disgusting of them all is none other than NATO’s Secretary General Mark Rutte, who has been reframing Trump’s threats as “useful pressure” or “constructive debate,” translating the disruption into intent after the fact. His stance was termed “orchestrated groveling,” especially after he called Trump a “daddy” who has to sometimes use strong language with his children (implying that the European nations are America’s kids!).

Until European leaders abandon the role of caretakers and find the courage to confront and set clear red lines, the oversized baby will not only rule America but continue to test how far the rest of the world is willing to crawl to satisfy him.

Sun King

As long as we see an oversized baby in Trump, we can gather a lot of material for late night talk shows where we can laugh. And we may be unaware of any real dangers looming in the background. But there are already indications that there is another aspect in Trump’s rule that is actually ominous. What I’m about to say has already been analyzed by others – more recently in a recent social media message by Bernie Sanders:

Trump has contempt for the Constitution of the US and for the rule of law. … He has denied funding to states that committed the “crime” of voting against him in an election. He has attacked federal courts and ignored court orders. He has sent FBI agents into a Washington Post reporter’s home. He has withheld funding from universities whose curriculum he disagrees with. He is renaming federal buildings after himself. He is investigating his political opponents including the Conservative Chairman of the Federal Reserve, multiple Senators and the Attorney General of the State of New York. … When you add all of these up and more, Trump is undermining the foundations of American democracy and everything this country has stood for since its inception.

I will expand it here with another analogy, although I still feel it is, yet again, an understatement:

In business, self-naming is quite common – Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Ford, Ferrari, Disney, and Hilton function as brands derived from their originators’ names. The name operates as a trademark denoting value and good quality. The Trump Towers throughout the world are named this way in the same spirit. But in politics, things work differently: As a rule, buildings are named after famous people to honor them posthumously. Only dictators like Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Kim Il-Sung have named buildings after themselves while alive (Stalin even named a city after himself – Stalingrad). Therefore, when Trump recently placed his name alongside Kennedy’s, renaming the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, he removed the boundary between private brand and public institution. This is not simply an expression of pure and plain narcissism, but worse, an indication he is treating public office as an extension of his personal property.

The phrase “I am the state” (L’État, c’est moi.) is traditionally attributed to Louis XIV, the seventeenth-century Sun King of France. This phrase has become synonymous with absolutism – the merging of state and ruler – and it is used in political theory as shorthand for personalist power. Unsurprisingly, Louis XIV and Trump have many things in common: The Palace of Versailles, just as the Trump Towers and the current “gilded renovations” in the White House, were both designed to overwhelm through their imposing architecture and gold-leafed walls and furniture; Louis used elaborate court ceremonies to impress the world, while Trump does the same through mass rallies and social-media fireworks; Louis saturated France with his face on coins, portraits, and statues, while Trump floods the digital sphere with his name, the praise others bestow upon him (occasionally he even refers to himself in the third person even in press conferences), and he has also created a digital coin with his face on it! This way, loyalty is directed not to institutions, but to the ruler’s vain persona.

Seen in this light, Trump’s renaming act, renovations, and personal cult, are not just innocuous idiosyncrasies. Coupled with his being surrounded by flatterers and yes-men (the “courtiers” of Louis XIV), this amounts to a new political reality that encloses a structural warning: By erasing the boundary between the individual and the state, he accelerates a political degeneration in which the United States drifts away from democracy and towards authoritarianism. What once relied on institutions, norms, and the rule of law is increasingly reorganized around Trump’s ego, narcissism, and transient impulses. This is how democracies gradually collapse, in full daylight, into rule by one.

*****

History may eventually restore proportion. With distance, future writers might articulate with clarity what feels impossible to fully convey now. Someday, the vocabulary may evolve to describe the present. Until then, those of us writing inside this unprecedented new reality must accept the mismatch. We write knowing our words will sound insufficient. Still, we write anyway as a form of catharsis. I, at least, regard this piece as a form of self-medication to preserve my sanity. It is also a self-reminder that what once was thought unthinkable is actually happening right now, before my very eyes.

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Feel depressed? Take a pill.

Hungry? Order a pizza or a hamburger.

Bored? Go on Netflix.

Want to escape? Read a bestselling novel.

Having an existential crisis? Try this podcast or this self-help book.

In today’s world, there’s a solution for everything. Near at hand. Effortless. Immediate.

We live in the Era of Instant Gratification.

We live in an age of pills that “cure” everything: depression, fatigue, insomnia, overweight, sexual impotence … We call “depression” an ailment like it’s a flu, and take a pill to get rid of it, without it crossing our minds that its causes lie in our whole life and the cure comes with understanding and with lifestyle changes. We feel an existential void or a vague feeling of “boredom,” and instead of examining our life at a deeper level and meditating on the why of it all, we switch on the TV and binge a series for eight hours, disconnecting with the real world and entering an imaginary one. Alternatively, we start scrolling short videos on TikTok or YouTube, jumping aimlessly from one theme to another, succumbing to the digital algorithms that have figured out how to maximize our “engagement” so that they can serve us more ads.

To read the entire essay for free, click this link.

Feel depressed? Take a pill.

Hungry? Order a pizza or a hamburger.

Bored? Go on Netflix.

Want to escape? Read a bestselling novel.

Having an existential crisis? Try this podcast or this self-help book.

In today’s world, there’s a solution for everything. Near at hand. Effortless. Immediate.

We live in the Era of Instant Gratification.

We live in an age of pills that “cure” everything: depression, fatigue, insomnia, overweight, sexual impotence … We call “depression” an ailment like it’s a flu, and take a pill to get rid of it, without it crossing our minds that its causes lie in our whole life and the cure comes with understanding and with lifestyle changes. We feel an existential void or a vague feeling of “boredom,” and instead of examining our life at a deeper level and meditating on the why of it all, we switch on the TV and binge a series for eight hours, disconnecting with the real world and entering an imaginary one. Alternatively, we start scrolling short videos on TikTok or YouTube, jumping aimlessly from one theme to another, succumbing to the digital algorithms that have figured out how to maximize our “engagement” so that they can serve us more ads.

We don’t read books from beginning to end anymore, but rather seek their summaries in predigested, compressed, and stripped-of-difficulty snippets. Apps now offer us ten-minute voice summaries, distillations of entire books so we can get the “key takeaways” without having to read and strain our minds. These apps have transformed reading from an act of reflection into an act of extraction. We no longer read to be shaped or challenged by a book, but to collect its summary points.

But even when we choose to read a book, we lean towards a light bestseller; we seek “consumable” book-candy that excites our emotions. A classic literary novel might start slowly, asking you to invest in understanding the development of characters and its themes over many pages. In the end you gain insights into the human condition or see the world with new eyes. A mass-market thriller or a formulaic bestseller churned out in a hurry is designed to hook you from page one, excite your senses with nonstop action or romance, and keep you turning pages. Nothing wrong with excitement once in a while, but becoming hooked on reading these fairytales for adults to escape reality is no different from eating a hamburger with a Coke every day. As for reading nonfiction books that delve into the human condition more directly and with a greater magnification – forget it! My new book, The Eternal Ragpicker, has already been relegated to the bottom of the Amazon lists and is nowhere to be found organically.

The same has happened to the arts too. A film used to take its time to develop. This “slow build” allowed themes to ferment and mature, much like a fine wine developing complexity over time. Today’s mainstream entertainment, however, feels the need to grab attention in the first seconds with fireworks and action, lest the audience lose interest. The rise of streaming services like Netflix, which release entire seasons of a show at once, has transformed viewing into an insatiable binge experience. We no longer anticipate episodes week by week; instead, we devour stories in marathon sessions. The magic of cinema as an event – going to a theater, waiting in line, the lights dimming as the film reels up – has been erased by the easily accessible content on our couches. The narrative pacing of storytelling has shifted to keep up with shortened attention spans; if a movie or book doesn’t thrill us immediately, we are tempted to abandon it and scroll to the next thing. (Check out my recent essay “The Era of the Unfocused Mind.”)

Perhaps nothing illustrates the tradeoff of instant vs. delayed gratification better than our eating habits. When hunger strikes, a quick hamburger or candy bar promises immediate satisfaction: it’s hot, tasty, hits the spot. Fast food pleases our taste buds instantly with salt, sugar, and fat. But as soon as the last bite is gone, we feel heavy or sluggish, and we are certainly not truly nourished. The greasy burger devoured in minutes provides scant vitamins or lasting energy. A balanced meal at home takes time and effort, and you might feel hungrier as you wait. Yet that home-cooked meal will likely leave you feeling better and healthier in the long run.

But still, why is instant gratification bad?

Let’s start from the very beginning.

Marshmallows and the Pleasure Principle

The most frequently cited scientific exploration of instant versus delayed gratification is the Stanford marshmallow experiment, conducted in the late 1960s by psychologist Walter Mischel. In the original experiment, children aged four to five were seated alone in a room and offered a simple choice: They could eat one marshmallow immediately, or wait for a short period and receive two. The experimenter left the room, and the child’s behavior was observed. Some ate the marshmallow almost instantly. Others waited, some barely, some heroically. What fascinated Mischel was not simply who waited, but how they waited. The children who succeeded rarely did so by sheer force of will. Instead, they distracted themselves: They sang, turned away, covered their eyes, or transformed the marshmallow into an abstract object in their imagination. Delay, in other words, was not brute resistance but a cognitive strategy. Follow-up studies conducted years later showed that those who were able to delay gratification tended, on average, to perform better academically, score higher on standardized tests, maintain healthier body weights, and show lower rates of substance abuse. These findings seem to suggest that the ability to postpone immediate pleasure in favor of a future reward is not merely a childhood quirk, but a foundational life skill. The children who delayed gratification behaved as if the future were real, trustworthy, and worth investing in. The marshmallow represented not just sugar, but faith in time itself – the belief that waiting would be rewarded rather than betrayed.

Beyond childhood experiments, similar patterns appear throughout adult life. Research in education has repeatedly shown that students who are able to postpone immediate pleasures – social media, entertainment, idle leisure – in favor of long-term academic goals perform better and experience less stress. This phenomenon, known as “academic delay of gratification,” predicts outcomes far more reliably than raw intelligence. Intelligence may determine how quickly one understands something; the ability to delay gratification determines whether one perseveres long enough to understand anything at all.

Perhaps no other thinker in recent times has raised the concept of “delaying gratification” to the highest pedestal of healthy living than the late psychiatrist M. Scott Peck. What the marshmallow experiment demonstrated empirically, Peck articulated psychologically. He famously began his 1978 classic The Road Less Traveled with the blunt truth that “Life is difficult.” He then introduced his book’s foundational concept:

Delaying gratification is the process of scheduling the pain and pleasure of life in such a way as to enhance the pleasure by meeting and experiencing the pain first and getting it over with. It is the only decent way to live.

He observed that many people try to avoid necessary suffering – we procrastinate, ignore issues, or “even take drugs to deaden ourselves to the pain, hoping to forget the problems that cause it.” Indeed, many of us behave as if life “should” be easy and simple, and we resent problems that take time to solve. We want solutions now, enjoyment now, understanding now. But this avoidance of any delay or difficulty may be making us mentally and morally weaker. Peck warned that a habit of avoiding effort and suffering actually creates more difficulties in the long run. He noted that “attempting to get out of problems rather than suffering through them only delays reckoning”; the pain catches up eventually. In short, the more we insist on instant ease, the less prepared we are to handle life’s inevitable challenges.

Though couched in moral and existential language, Peck’s conception of delayed gratification has a clear psychoanalytic antecedent in the work of Sigmund Freud. Freud articulated a similar dynamic describing the human psyche’s progression from the pleasure principle – the innate drive towards immediate satisfaction – to the reality principle, which enables the individual to navigate the constraints of external reality by deferring gratification. As Freud notes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the mature ego “no longer lets itself be governed by the pleasure principle, but obeys the reality principle … even though it be pleasure postponed and diminished.”

Peck would disagree, of course, with the word “diminished,” since in his very definition he says that the delay enhances the final pleasure; that pleasure itself is intensified when it comes after effort, challenges, or pain. While Freud emphasized the adaptive necessity of this shift for psychic stability, Peck framed it as a moral imperative for growth and wholeness. Despite their differing vocabularies, both thinkers converge on the idea that the capacity to delay gratification is essential to human development. In this light, the contemporary rise of cultural forces that promote immediate pleasure and avoid discomfort may be understood not merely as a social trend but as a challenge to the basic psychological structure upon which maturity depends.

One may retort that Freud’s pleasure principle is ever-present and that the delaying of gratification, although an indispensable part of becoming a mature and successful adult, is just that, a delay, and therefore does not go contrary to the pleasure principle. Society may end up giving us “a reality check,” as we say, but the seeking of pleasure remains in the background and guides our actions. In view of this, and repeating the earlier question in a different form:

What’s wrong with pursuing a quicker excitement if the pursuit of pleasure is a fundamental and legitimate drive in life?

Video Games and Diapers

Well, the marshmallow experiment already showed us that delayed gratification is a better strategy in life as a whole, and Peck and Freud explained how it is the sign of maturity and the only way to personal growth. But there is another, even simpler reason: no thrill lasts forever! The intense highs of any experience – whether it’s the rush of a new video game, the drama of a binge-worthy series, or the honeymoon phase of a new purchase – inevitably fade as we adapt. If we have built our life around chasing those highs, we are left empty or bored when they evaporate. If someone makes excitement the goal of life – hopping from one thrill to the next – he will quickly find the thrills diminishing. Imagine a person playing a new video game: the first few hours or days might be incredibly exciting, providing an adrenaline rush. But if he plays the same game for weeks in a row, the novelty wears off. The experience that was so promising at first becomes ordinary and dull in the middle, and utterly empty, if not painful, in the end. This is a common pattern: one instant gratification after another eventually adds up, not to a satisfied life but to a lot of wasted time – an existence that feels aimless and hollow once the quick highs are gone. Because nothing can stay novel and thrilling forever, the chase after pleasure either escalates (needing bigger and bigger highs) or collapses (into boredom and disappointment).

And herein lies the answer to the question above:

The pursuit of instant gratification, when turned into a lifestyle, is self-defeating.

In extreme cases, the addiction to immediate gratification can reach almost absurd levels. Consider the troubling phenomenon seen among some young online gamers in recent years: They are so addicted to their video games that they even refuse to take breaks for basic needs. In China, where online gaming addiction is more widespread, this phenomenon has been termed “electronic heroin.” An online documentary talks of teenagers wearing diapers so they don’t have to pause their marathon gaming sessions to use the bathroom! This shocking image – a teen literally foregoing one of life’s simplest natural breaks in order to remain fixated on a digital screen – is the most potent expression of the instant gratification trap. It shows how an innocent pleasure (playing a fun game) can spiral into something pathological when all balance and self-control is lost. The fact that internet addiction rehab camps have popped up in China (run by the army!) underscores that a life of unchecked instant gratification can become so consuming that it requires drastic intervention.

The younger generations are growing up in a world where instant gratification promises pleasure without build-up, satisfaction without struggle, and resolution without the slow painful passage through uncertainty. Without allowing time to unfold, and the longing to mature and shape desire, instant satisfaction offers the illusion that fulfillment can be separated from effort. Instant gratification ends up suggesting that anything that takes time is defective, that discomfort is a flaw in the system rather than a signal to grow. Gradually, in such a culture and mindset, the ability to wait or persevere becomes unintelligible (“Now, why wait?!”) and slowness a failure (“This movie is too slow – can’t stand it!”). The very conditions that once made pleasure rich – anticipation, effort, uncertainty, mystery – are stripped away in favor of something shallower and infinitely repeatable.

Nature’s Way

But pursuing instant gratification is not only bad but unnatural: Instant gratification is not the law of Nature! In Nature, every organism that grows and lives is the product of time and struggle. Plants take months or years to bear fruit. Animals spend most of their day hunting to survive. A seed must break, push through the soil, reach for light, and endure foragers before becoming a tree; a young tree has to persevere and survive through hailstorms and forest fires; a young lion will have to try many times before it catches its first prey; a bird builds its nest one twig at a time. Life for these creatures is certainly not simple or easy, yet that is the natural order that has allowed them to thrive for millennia.

But we don’t need to look far, for human life is similar: A musician practices years to master his instrument; an athlete trains through pain and exhaustion in order to one day, years later, be able to have the first taste of victory; a couple might endure years of personal sacrifices to raise a child in order to later enjoy the deep fulfillment of seeing them mature. We are not entitled to perpetual comfort without effort. Our ancestors understood that hard work, delay, and planning were necessary. Even small daily acts follow this logic: the sweetness of dessert is heightened if it comes after a wholesome meal; a weekend of leisure feels earned and truly relaxing when it follows a week of hard work.

Delaying gratification is not about embracing masochism or rejecting joy; it’s about choosing a better joy that comes later over a trivial pleasure now. The sweetness of a reward is so much richer when it comes gradually and it is truly earned – patience and persistence transform into profound gratification, which is far more enduring than the instant version. Modern conveniences have obscured some of those lessons, but they haven’t rewritten the rules of fulfillment. If anything, depression and anxiety in modern societies can be seen as the sign that a life of all ease and no striving doesn’t satisfy our deeper needs.

Transient Pleasure vs. Lasting Happiness

But one may retort as follows: “Well, Man is a dazzling exception! What separates us from the animal world is precisely our ability to transcend delay – to have a desire and see it fulfilled in seconds. An animal must hunt, forage, wait, endure. We, by contrast, order food and it arrives at our door; we ask a question and have an instant answer; we press a button and a machine does the work for us. In this light, instant gratification is not a weakness but an evolutionary achievement – a triumph of intelligence and technology over brute necessity. Unlike any other creature, we have developed the ability to minimize effort, reduce time, extract rewards without long rituals. We no longer hunt; we order. We no longer wait; we tap. We no longer toil the earth; combine harvesters do. In this sense, instant gratification is not a failure but a feat.”

This sounds like a strong argument. But the answer to such a train of thought may be quite simple: The necessity for effort and struggle is not an evolutionary leftover to be discarded, but a requirement for us to remain human!

We need to struggle not for survival, but for Meaning.

Victor Frankl, the great twentieth century psychiatrist whose work bridges psychology and philosophy, says just that, and argues that there is a deeper, philosophical reason why instant gratification is both pernicious and self-defeating. His main thesis is that happiness cannot be pursued directly, and certainly not instantly:

Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to be happy. Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy ...

In other words, chasing joy itself via instant pleasures is futile – the more you desperately try to feel good all the time, the more happiness eludes you. True happiness arises naturally when you dedicate yourself to something bigger, or endure through challenges for a worthy cause.

If Frankl were alive today, he would not have denied the triumph of modern technology, but he would have reminded us that comfort and ease is not the same as fulfillment. In fact, when suffering and delay are entirely eliminated, we may lose not only hardship but the very structures that orient our lives: sacrifice, growth, commitment, purpose. For Frankl, what elevates humanity above animals is not the ability to remove effort, but the willingness to endure it for the sake of Meaning.

Arthur Brooks, a renowned Harvard professor and writer, nowadays expresses Frankl’s insights in more contemporary language. In a recent interview, he had this to say:

One of the greatest ways for you to miss the meaning of your life is to try to avoid your suffering. The Buddhists have this “math”: Suffering is pain multiplied by resistance. You can go to the … therapy industrial complex in the Western world today to try to lower your pain, or you can try to be fully alive and lower your resistance. In so doing, what happens is that the suffering ultimately declines because you’ve turned it into learning and growth. […] Nobody ever said “I really figured out what I was made of that week at the beach in Ibiza.” No. They found it [meaning] “when mom died,” “when I almost lost my business,” “when I got really sick,” “when I was truly scared and made my way through it.” When going through, the suffering becomes the teacher. […] A culture that tries to get rid of pain, is a culture that gets rid of meaning.

Together, the aforementioned perspectives reinforce and expand each other: the marshmallow experiment shows what delayed gratification can achieve, Peck explains how it works beneficially to foster our growth and maturity, and Frankl reveals why it matters in order for our life to be meaningful. Each layer adds depth to a single truth: A meaningful life is built not on the unsteady transient pursuit of instant pleasure, but on the solid foundations of the willingness to stay engaged with difficulty through effort and struggle. In embracing life’s difficulties and complexities, we find a more profound happiness than any instant gratification could ever offer.

Societal Cost

But the Era of Instant Gratification goes well beyond the personal aspect we have been examining up to now. It has infiltrated almost every aspect of contemporary life and affects our society in tangible, measurable ways.

In the realm of professional development, the expectation of quick rewards has begun to undermine the perseverance required for creating a successful and rewarding career. Today’s youth is switching jobs at higher rates than ever before. Surveys have shown that millennials are significantly more likely to leave jobs within a year, while gen Z job-switching increased by over 130 percent between 2019 and 2022! This trend is driven by expectations for faster advancement and success. Our youth expects promotions within a year and become demotivated when the day-to-day doesn’t feel exciting or instantly rewarding. The older Japanese ideal of staying in the same company for one’s whole life (so praised in the 70s and 80s) and growing professionally in a family-like environment, is gradually disappearing – even in Japan.

In the field of human relationships, dating apps encourage nonstop browsing, fostering the illusion that a better match is always one swipe away. As a result, the skills necessary to build intimacy or sustain commitment are eroding. Friendships, too, are affected: We confuse digital interaction – likes and comments – for real communication. The result is a paradox of inflated “connectivity” with deep loneliness. Research has found that nearly half of Americans report feeling alone or left out, despite high levels of social media use.

Although somehow hidden, the impact of this mindset also spills into the economy as a whole. The desire for instant material rewards fuels consumer debt: Impulse purchases, credit card overuse, and speculative investments are all symptoms of collective impatience. The 2008 financial crisis revealed how seeking quick profits can lead to catastrophic consequences. Even today, market volatility often reflects an investor psychology driven more by fast returns.

Politically, the culture of immediacy erodes our democratic life. Long-term policymaking requires patience, negotiation, and vision – traits increasingly at odds with a public guided by sound bites and conditioned by short-term results. Politicians, as a rule, prioritize short-term popularity over structural reform and long-term projects. As a result, complex issues like fighting pollution, improving infrastructure, reforming education, are often reduced to slogans and shelved when immediate results are not forthcoming.

*****

The quest for instant gratification, though cloaked in promises of ease and abundance, has quietly eroded the very structures that sustain our psychological and spiritual growth as well as our societal well-being. In our haste to bypass delay and discomfort, we have abandoned the path on which character is built and meaning is forged: facing life’s challenges and struggles head-on. As Peck and Frankl have demonstrated, the disciplined deferral of pleasure and the acceptance of pain is life’s great sculptor that leads to personal success and the attainment of true and lasting happiness and meaning. When we strip life of all friction, all longing, waiting, and struggle, we enter a labyrinth of never-ending transient pleasures and cease to grow. Today, our fleeting attachments, restless careers, fragile economies, and short-sighted politics reveal the deeper toll of a culture allergic to patience. In a world increasingly seduced by the immediate, it is an act of resistance – and perhaps even a form of wisdom – to choose the slow path.

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The turning of the new year has a peculiar way of awakening dormant longings. Even those who generally remain physically still, during this time of the year feel a subtle restlessness. For some this expresses itself as an urge to move, to travel, to explore new countries and places. Today’s piece addresses these restless souls.

Over the years, I have received an increasing number of messages – many from younger readers – asking for travel advice. Rarely are the questions about logistics alone. They are rather about travel in general, and of course I tell them to read my book Destination Earth that has “the answers to most of your questions about travel.” But I know few read books nowadays, so I end up repeating over and over again, to different people, some of the main “realizations of a world-traveler.”

So today, I will be publishing four of these important “realizations” about the world which is none other than our Larger Home which is always present and lures us to get to know it better. These are taken from my book and adapted for the present purpose. They emphasize trusting the world and universal belonging.

Let 2026 be a year of new explorations and discoveries.

May you all explore at least three new countries or territories out of the 240 this year!

For life is short and …

The World Is Huge

The world is huge! This is one of the first and most shocking realizations of a world-traveler. It is truly surprising how much bigger it is than most of us think. We all grow up measuring distances with the ruler and units of our own country. For Europeans, who live in the second-smallest continent of the planet and use as their measuring rod distances from Frankfurt to Paris and Rome to Vienna, the sizes of most non-European countries turn out to be much bigger than they could ever have imagined. But even Americans or Chinese, who might not be so impressed by the sizes of other countries, soon discover that their own seemingly huge countries are but a very small part of a much grander whole.

Very few people realize that Mexico is more than five times the size of Germany. Or that Brazil is the size of the whole of Europe (minus Greenland and European Russia). Japan, being next to immense China, seems to be the size of England, yet in fact it is larger than Germany. And the inconspicuous, almost invisible Antarctica is actually half the size of Africa!

To read the entire essay for free, click here.

The turning of the new year has a peculiar way of awakening dormant longings. Even those who generally remain physically still, during this time of the year feel a subtle restlessness. For some this expresses itself as an urge to move, to travel, to explore new countries and places. Today’s piece addresses these restless souls.

Over the years, I have received an increasing number of messages – many from younger readers – asking for travel advice. Rarely are the questions about logistics alone. They are rather about travel in general, and of course I tell them to read my book Destination Earth that has “the answers to most of your questions about travel.” But I know few read books nowadays, so I end up repeating over and over again, to different people, some of the main “realizations of a world-traveler.”

So today, I will be publishing four of these important “realizations” about the world which is none other than our Larger Home which is always present and lures us to get to know it better. These are taken from my book and adapted for the present purpose. They emphasize trusting the world and universal belonging.

Let 2026 be a year of new explorations and discoveries.

May you all explore at least three new countries or territories out of the 240 this year!

For life is short and …

The World Is Huge

The world is huge! This is one of the first and most shocking realizations of a world-traveler. It is truly surprising how much bigger it is than most of us think. We all grow up measuring distances with the ruler and units of our own country. For Europeans, who live in the second-smallest continent of the planet and use as their measuring rod distances from Frankfurt to Paris and Rome to Vienna, the sizes of most non-European countries turn out to be much bigger than they could ever have imagined. But even Americans or Chinese, who might not be so impressed by the sizes of other countries, soon discover that their own seemingly huge countries are but a very small part of a much grander whole.

Very few people realize that Mexico is more than five times the size of Germany. Or that Brazil is the size of the whole of Europe (minus Greenland and European Russia). Japan, being next to immense China, seems to be the size of England, yet in fact it is larger than Germany. And the inconspicuous, almost invisible Antarctica is actually half the size of Africa!

People forget that the maps we use are two-dimensional artificial portrayals of a sphere, and that almost everything in them is distorted. There is no substitute for studying an actual three-dimensional globe in order to understand, and more importantly feel, the size of the Earth and the interrelationship of its landmasses and oceans. When one carefully studies the three-dimensional globe, one immediately discovers how small Europe is (only two percent of the total surface area of the Earth), and also how far north it is situated. One also realizes that Africa is actually much bigger in size than it appears to be on a two-dimensional map and that Australia is in fact smaller than Brazil. Another shocking observation when examining the globe up close is that the landmasses of the Earth (the main objects of exploration of a world-traveler) comprise less than one-third of its total surface.

The World Is Providing

Snow lions don’t freeze in snow mountains

Vultures don’t fall out of the sky

Fish don’t drown in water

Practitioners don’t die of hunger.

So cast away this life’s concerns!

Give up plans for the future!

– Shabkar (Tibetan monk of the 19^th century)

Every living organism exists by virtue of its being adapted to its environment. Every organism is provided by Nature with everything it needs for its survival, growth, and reproduction. Since a human being is an organism too, then every human being is similarly being taken care of. Just as a wolf searches and finds its deer, and as a bird finds its seeds, every human finds what his body and mind search for. What Shabkar’s poem says in the simplest words is that any fear of dying, any fear of not being provided for, is unfounded. Any such fear is actually contradicted by the most obvious facts of life if we but observe them in their utter simplicity.

Yet, out of fear of the unknown, a large part of the world’s population never travels. At its heart is the fear that one’s needs will not be taken care of, that one will wander alone and helpless in the world. That is why the majority of those who travel choose to do so in a manner that allows them to feel as though they have never left their comfort zones. The majority of travelers who choose to join group tours do so not just to save money but also to feel safe and secure and to have the certainty that nothing will go wrong. Behind modern mass tourism lies an unexpressed fear of the unknown.

A second fear is that of not being in control. The modern travel agency or tour operator solves both: It makes the unknown seem known by showing photos of the places to be visited, and it deals with the fear of the traveler not being in control by offering its own control over the way one will travel – it provides fixed itineraries and detailed schedules. The traveler therefore buys the illusion of both security and control over his journey by relinquishing his freedom. However, by doing so, he paradoxically turns the journey into something that is beyond his control, since everything has already been planned by others.

What is great about Shabkar’s poem is that it takes the fear of the unknown to its extreme and identifies it with the fear of dying. What is the worst thing the unknown can do to you? Kill you! If the worst of all fears is dealt with by observing that “fish don’t drown in water,” then by realizing the universality of this principle of Life, all other lesser fears ought to vanish. If the fear of dying is removed, what is there to fear? Shabkar’s poem also implicitly deals with the fear of losing control. It says that Nature is permanently in control of everything within its domain, which is everything. One is never actually in control. Nature is. And Nature is always providing. We may actually identify Nature with the universe itself, and even come to see its power of sustenance as being none other than the Divine Providence of religions. This Providence is not something remote or ethereal in the sky. It is actually palpable and constantly envelops our whole being. Everything that sustains us is part of this Providence, be it the air we breathe or the food we eat.

What is less easily acknowledged is the highest expression of this Providence: our fellow human beings. As social beings, we grow up in a society and are constantly sustained by a human community. The overwhelming majority of our fellow humans are more than willing to help us when we are seen to need help or when we explicitly ask for it. “Practitioners don’t die of hunger,” not only because Nature provides for plenty of food and shelter, but also because other practitioners will visit the hermit in his hermitage and bring him whatever he needs. Similarly, all the needs of a traveler are met through his interactions and dealings with other humans. Whatever he needs is always there to meet him. There is food and shelter, means of travel and information, mobile service everywhere to connect with the world, and above all, other people to ask for advice or help.

After a few months of travel, every long-term traveler begins to experience this self-evident and ever-present reality of a providing world – which is a more limited, practical, and nonreligious expression of the more all-encompassing concept of Divine Providence. After a year or so, this becomes a reality that guides one’s thoughts and actions. The traveler ceases to over-plan, worry, or have any doubts about the ability to handle whatever problem appears along the way. Even if, at times, the providing world may seem to temporarily fail us for the little needs we never tire of artificially creating Shabkar’s absolute certainty that all major problems are solved while an organism is still alive becomes one’s governing philosophy. There is a certainty in the traveler’s mind that every single thing shall be taken care of as it appears, one by one, day after day.

The World Is Safe

Another central realization that is somehow related to the above, yet is quite distinct, concerns the safety of travel. Most travel books are obsessed with “Annoyances & Dangers.” Sometimes one gets the feeling that these travel-guide writers believe that they move in a hostile and dangerous world. Reading these chapters, the traveler may subsequently become obsessed with matters of security and safety.

During the early parts of a journey, the traveler may be a bit conscious of security and safety and heed the books’ warnings by being cautious at night and avoiding certain areas. Yet, as one moves through the world and obtains a more complete picture of the nature of other societies and cultures, one begins to understand that the exact opposite is true: The world is an amazingly safe place.

The real outside world is no different than the world each one of us happens to be in right now – do you see any danger around you, do you feel unsafe right now? Notwithstanding extremely rare and special cases, the world is as safe as it is around you as you read this book. Being run over by a car is more probable than being violently robbed or attacked in the street, yet we go on crossing streets. The rule is what matters, not the exception. It is such a pity that so many people base their decisions and even their whole lives on the rare exceptions of life.

This simple truth is disguised by myths that people create and then believe. These are myths about criminals, dangers, “bad neighborhoods,” or countries and even continents to avoid. Those who believe in these myths have often never left their own countries. Some do not even dare to walk a few blocks from their own houses for fear of criminals. However, those fears exist only in the mind, in the imaginary worlds that people create, replacing the real world they never get to know.

We live not only in a safe world, but also in a friendly world. Wherever we go, we are surrounded by helpful people who treat us with kindness and respect. Everywhere, there are swarms of people who come to assist us – whether we are engaged in the trivial search for a toilet or the more complicated task of finding the right hotel. The overwhelming majority of people are kind, helpful, openhearted, polite. A surprisingly huge number even go to extremes to assist the traveler. Many people may go out of their way to walk you to a junction so that they are sure you do not get lost, others go about trying to solve a problem you have as if it is their own, while others invite you into their home or to their son’s wedding.

Another myth is that the off-the-beaten-track destinations are more difficult or more dangerous than the well-known ones. This could not be further from the truth. In more touristy destinations, which have professional services for the traveler’s needs, people tend to take the traveler for granted and be less helpful. Of course, all the comforts provided by the tourist industry itself – which is, as a rule, helpful and friendly – more than make up for this tendency of people accustomed to tourists to be less helpful. However, in the less-touristy destinations, where comforts are less and know-how scarce, the average man on the street enters into the picture to make up for the deficiency. Every person in a small and isolated village offers to become your guide, your helper, or your guardian angel.

Universal Belonging

Humans need to belong. From the moment we are born, we belong to our family, our clan, our nation. We grow up belonging to classrooms, sports teams, fraternities, religious or civic associations. Many people even obtain their sense of identity through such identifications and memberships. Some feel that belonging to a group excludes others, and often those excluded form the entity with respect to which the group obtains its own feeling of self-identity. “Us” versus “the others” is often part and parcel of the idea of this type of belonging. Yet true belonging becomes perverted through such limited views.

One of the first experiences of a world-traveler is the realization that he need not make any special effort to belong. He neither gives belonging any special attention, nor does he strive for it. This is a liberating feeling. We may call it “freedom from the idea of belonging.” One becomes liberated from the conditioned and unconscious craving for belonging to a group in order to feel “normal.” The traveler learns to accept his aloneness as natural and proper, while effortlessly relating to others. He then comes to feel comfortable in his aloneness and realizes that it is neither loneliness nor isolation. It is actually identical to solitude – a solitude amidst the world. Living in solitude means affirming our separateness and uniqueness as something natural, proper, and good. It also means affirming that there is no need to belong to any group, for we already belong to humanity as a whole, while maintaining our individual character.

Yet paradoxically, the realization that one need not belong in order to truly belong creates a new awareness of belonging to the world. This sense of belonging naturally expands to include all of humanity in its infinite variety and modes of expression. We may call this the realization of universal belonging. There is a new sense of freedom associated with this. It is not a feeling that one is free from society, since one is moving through many societies. It is rather a freedom within society. It is the freedom to be one’s true self, disregarding the common criteria of what one ought to be in order to belong to a social group or to society as a whole. One already belongs to society by default, by virtue of being human, irrespective of how one leads one’s life. True belonging, unlike the false sense of belonging that results from superficial and often alienating conformity, is all-inclusive – it accepts all groups and nations in it, but also all individuals. It is only when one faces oneself in solitude and accepts the reality of one’s differentiated nature and uniqueness that one begins to see in others the same expression of uniqueness and individuality. One then comes to see society in a new light: not as a medley of random units composing a mass, but as an entity full of potentialities, which is creative to the degree to which its individual elements retain and express their uniqueness in the whole. It is through the affirmation of one’s aloneness, individuality, and uniqueness that a consummate realization of true belonging arises.

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