When Natalie arrived, Sophie was already on the bench, coffee in hand.

“Looking good, Soph.” Natalie gave her the quick, assessing look Sophie knew well. “I like the redness in your eyes.”

“I didn’t sleep well.”

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But you might need one good question before summer ends. I have seven to choose from.

I don’t think philosophy needs to be read systematically. Sometimes the best way into a philosopher is simply to begin with a question that has already been on your mind.

So choose the one that feels closest to your life right now—and take the book with you.

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If you’ve been wondering whether you’re living the life you actually chose:
The Ethics of Ambiguity — Simone de Beauvoir

We like to imagine freedom as having possibilities. De Beauvoir makes it much more complicated.

To be free also means accepting that other people are free, that our choices affect lives beyond our own, and that there is no perfectly correct way to live waiting to be discovered.

Sometimes I think adulthood is largely the discovery that freedom and responsibility were never opposites.

If you’ve been thinking too much about happiness:
The Conquest of Happiness — Bertrand Russell

One of the things I love about Russell is how little patience he has for our tendency to make ourselves the center of every investigation.

Perhaps happiness does not require another journey inward. Perhaps we occasionally need the opposite: curiosity about people, work, ideas, places—anything capable of making us forget ourselves for a while.

A useful book to read somewhere you have never been before.

If you’re having a small identity crisis somewhere beautiful:
The Myth of Sisyphus — Albert Camus

Camus begins with the question of whether life is worth living and somehow writes a book that makes me want to live more attentively.

We keep expecting life to explain itself to us. Why this happened. What all of it means. Where exactly we are going. Camus considers the possibility that no answer is coming.

And then asks the much more interesting question: how should we live anyway?

If you’ve been wondering whether anyone truly sees anyone else:
I and Thou — Martin Buber

Buber believed there are different ways of encountering another person.

We can experience people, interpret them, need something from them, decide who they are. Or, occasionally, we can actually meet them.

I return to this idea often because I suspect much of intimacy depends on something extraordinarily difficult: allowing another person to remain a person rather than slowly becoming our idea of them.

If your holiday has given you too much time to think about love:
The Art of Loving — Erich Fromm

We spend an enormous amount of time wondering whether we are loved and surprisingly little wondering whether we know how to love.

Fromm treats love not as something we fall into but as a capacity we develop—with attention, discipline, patience, and knowledge.

It changes the question from Have I found the right person? to What kind of person am I when I love?

I’m not sure the second question is as romantic. I do think it is more useful.

If you keep postponing the life you want:
The Death of Ivan Ilyich — Leo Tolstoy

Not technically a philosophy book. I’m including it anyway.

Few philosophers have frightened me as efficiently as Tolstoy does in fewer than a hundred pages.

Ivan Ilyich does almost everything correctly. He builds a respectable life, follows the expected path, becomes the person he is supposed to become.

Only when that life is ending does he begin to wonder whether he was ever actually living it.

Read on holiday at your own risk.

If everything is going rather well and you’d like to complicate it:
Either/Or — Søren Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard is interested in what happens when choosing one life means giving up all the others.

Pleasure or commitment. Possibility or responsibility. The fascinating life we could keep imagining or the imperfect one we actually choose.

I think about this more as I get older: perhaps the hardest part of choosing is not deciding what we want.

It is accepting all the lives we will not live.

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I wouldn’t take all seven on holiday.

Take one.

Preferably the one whose question you were hoping I wouldn’t ask.

Which one would you choose?

The moment has come, and I’m sending you the first chapter of a novel whose universe has lived in my mind for quite a while.

The first edition was written three years ago, and back then, I didn’t fully realize that I wasn’t ready. My characters weren’t ready either. The story was rushed. So I put it on the shelf and waited.

Now, finally, I feel that this novel has knocked on my inner door again, and I’m ready to let it in—to write the story I wasn’t ready to write three years ago, and to ask: What remains of us when success, freedom, and ambition stop giving our lives meaning?

I hope you enjoy the first chapter. And please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. We have a small, intimate circle here, and I would genuinely love to know what stays with you.

C H A P T E R O N E

Sophie knew a toast was coming.

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Most of them aren’t English. Some I still can’t pronounce with enough confidence to embarrass myself in public, so I practice them only when I’m alone.

Every time I discover another one, I write it down. I rarely use them afterwards. For years, I thought I was collecting beautiful words.

Then one question quietly rearranged the way I looked at them.

Why did these words exist in the first place?

Not linguistically.

Humanly.

That’s when I stopped seeing them as curiosities.

I started seeing them as evidence.

It slowly dawned on me that language is what attention looks like after centuries have passed.

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That thought sent me back to Jorge Luis Borges.

Borges spent much of his life wandering through libraries. He imagined them as labyrinths, places where every book quietly opened the door to another, where every discovery led not to certainty but to a deeper mystery. I had always assumed that what fascinated him was the endlessness of books. Lately, I’ve begun to suspect it was something else. Libraries preserve conversations. They remember what people loved, feared, questioned, argued over, and carried forward long after the people themselves disappeared.

Perhaps dictionaries do the same.

Until recently, I thought dictionaries existed to answer questions. They settled arguments over spelling or explained where a word had come from. Now I find myself opening them for almost the opposite reason. They have become books full of questions.

Why did one civilization decide that this particular experience deserved a word while another let it dissolve into ordinary life?

What happened so consistently that people stopped describing it every time and gave it a name?

The longer I sit with those questions, the less objective a dictionary appears. We tend to imagine it as a neutral catalogue, quietly recording a language that already exists. But every word was once an act of attention. Someone noticed something often enough that it refused to disappear. A distinction became necessary. An experience demanded permanence. Eventually, it entered the language, where it could outlive the people who first spoke it.

That is why I have started thinking about dictionaries as museums rather than reference books.

Museums do not preserve everything.

They preserve what someone believed was worth saving.

Perhaps dictionaries work the same way.

We usually say that civilizations leave behind monuments. We think of pyramids, temples, paintings, cathedrals, manuscripts. Yet words may be among the most enduring monuments of all. Stone tells us what a civilization built. Language tells us what it kept looking at.

It is tempting to think that languages simply accumulate vocabulary as history moves forward, as though dictionaries were growing collections of useful labels. I have started to suspect the opposite. Languages grow wherever attention lingers.

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The ancient Greeks did not spend centuries returning to questions of love, friendship, justice, and virtue because they enjoyed abstraction. They returned to those questions because they believed they were worth returning to. Their philosophy slowly settled into their language like sediment at the bottom of a river. Every distinction they insisted on preserving was also a quiet declaration that this part of being human deserved to be noticed.

Perhaps every civilization does this without realizing it.

The words survive.

The reasons often don’t.

Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

People often read that sentence as though he were arguing that we cannot think beyond our vocabulary.

I have begun to hear it differently.

Language does not erect walls around the world. It shines a light on certain corners of it.

The places illuminated become familiar.

The places left in shadow are easier to ignore.

Perhaps that is why every language teaches us to notice certain things with remarkable precision while allowing others to remain unnamed for generations. It does not imprison reality. It quietly guides our attention toward some parts of it more than others.

That possibility has become difficult to ignore whenever I think about the language we are leaving behind.

Every generation invents words that would have puzzled the generations before it. Ours has given names to ghosting, doomscrolling, breadcrumbing, quiet quitting, and countless other experiences born from lives lived partly through screens. We often dismiss these words as temporary slang, but perhaps they deserve to be taken more seriously. Vocabulary has always been history wearing ordinary clothes.

If future historians inherited nothing from us except our dictionaries, what portrait would they draw?

They would probably discover our fascination with productivity, efficiency, digital life, and exhaustion before they discovered our architecture or our politics. They would notice how much effort we invested in naming new forms of distraction and connection. They might conclude that we became extraordinarily good at describing the speed of modern life.

But I find myself wondering about something else.

What are we no longer naming?

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Every civilization develops extraordinary precision around the parts of life it cannot stop noticing. The reverse may also be true. Experiences disappear from language because they disappear from attention first. They do not vanish all at once. They simply become harder to see.

That thought has changed the way I look at my little collection of words.

I no longer write them down because they are unusual.

Or beautiful.

I write them down because each one reminds me that another human being, somewhere in another place and another century, paused before a particular experience long enough to rescue it from oblivion.

A word occupies almost no space.

Yet it can preserve an entire way of seeing the world.

Perhaps that is the deepest reason we learn another language.

Not simply to speak with different people.

But to borrow, for a while, their attention.

The older I grow, the less I think dictionaries explain language. I think they explain us. They are quiet archives of everything a civilization loved, feared, questioned, celebrated, and refused to let disappear. Long after its monuments begin to crumble, its words continue whispering what its people believed was worth noticing.

And perhaps that has been the purpose of language all along.

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It never did.

Every trip across the ocean, every breathtaking work of art, every fateful person or book changed me. Now, looking back, I realize it’s impossible to predict how those encounters will change me. I know only that I’m grateful for all the pieces of myself I have found through the fracture.

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I was born into a family where one parent is an insatiably curious traveller, while the other is a homebody who rarely leaves home. Don’t ask me how they managed to build a life together, but I’m grateful they did. The amusing part is that I seem to have inherited both.

I’m constantly travelling and moving. Even when I try to stay still, life has other plans. Sometimes it feels as though I’m trapped in a time loop where the scenery changes every day, while the circumstances remain the same.

At the same time, I’m a writer who needs solitude and tranquility to be prolific.

I've noticed that writers tend to fall into two groups. The first stays home, building entire worlds from a single desk. The second travels, discovering meaning through lived experience.

I happen to belong to the second group, and I’ve made my peace with it. In fact, nothing inspires me more than travelling alone.

Somewhere between writing for Substack, exploring philosophy, and finishing my first novel, I realized something…

The time had come to set out on my first world tour.

The Threshold has always been my attempt to turn lived experience into language. If I’m about to spend a year changing my own landscape, then the publication has to change with me.

The regular philosophical essays will continue. But I also want to make room for subjects that are more personal and intimate. The essays I've published over the past month have taught me that deeply focused series flourish best in a smaller, more engaged space. They deserve readers who genuinely want to spend time with them.

So, starting next week, you'll also find essays on culture, languages, and art; a world tour diary; behind-the-essays reflections; and, perhaps most excitingly, the serialized publication of my novel, You Are the Journey.

I'm excited—and a little nervous—about this next chapter. Travelling has taught me that a real journey doesn't always take you where you expect to go. Some places will surprise me. Some will unsettle me. Others will teach me something I couldn't have learned any other way.

The Threshold was created as a place where unfamiliar feelings and intuitive thoughts are given clear language. I hope it becomes something like the first cup of coffee in the morning—a small ritual that quietly changes the way you see the day.

My journey as a writer has taught me that the only way to create a place like that is to be honest—with the blank page and with you.

Also, it feels like a privilege to share my first novel here. At its heart is a question I’ve been carrying for years:

What remains of us when success, freedom, and ambition stop giving our lives meaning?

If you'd like to join me for the next chapter—the next twelve months of this journey—here's the invitation.

~

Weekly literary and philosophical essays

Letters from the Road &

The Writer's Notebook

Behind the Essays

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~

Weekly literary and philosophical essays

Letters from the Road &

The Writer’s Notebook

Behind the Essays

Exclusive serialization of You Are the Journey

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Maybe that’s why I always hold my breath before leaving. Not because I’m afraid of the places I’ll discover, but because I never know who will come home.

A few more lines before I start packing my suitcase...

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Romantic relationships are the hardest.

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The older I become, the more convinced I am that these are two very different things.

Once, I met someone I loved unconditionally. We were never together. We never tried to build a life. We simply met.

And somehow, that was enough.

There were no negotiations about the future. No questions about commitment. No fear of becoming incompatible. No attempts to make the other person fit into a shared vision of life.

There was only the quiet joy of another person’s existence.

Perhaps that is why we often remember such encounters with tenderness. They pass through our lives like clouds—beautiful, impossible to keep, leaving behind a trace of melancholy rather than resentment.

But the moment love becomes a relationship, the entire Pandora’s box falls from the attic with a deafening noise.

Suddenly, there are expectations.

There is the future.

There are sacrifices to negotiate, cities to choose, habits to build, fears to soothe, disappointments to survive, identities to protect, promises to keep. Love becomes intertwined with the practical architecture of a shared life.

Perhaps love never became difficult.

But life did.

This is the final essay in a series where I questioned some of the assumptions we quietly attach to romantic love.

We spoke about possession, jealousy, freedom, certainty, and commitment. We discovered that none of these things is love itself.

Love cannot own another consciousness.

Parts of another person’s inner world will always remain closed to us.

Neither of you will remain the same person.

At some point, after taking away almost everything I thought love promised, I found myself facing one final question.

Why dare to love at all?

The deeper I explored this question, the more I realized that human nature deceives us more than we like to admit.

We trust the stories we tell ourselves more than we trust reality. We fall in love not only with another person, but with the future we imagine, the role they play in our lives, the meaning they give our choices, and the version of ourselves we become beside them.

Eventually, I realized that everything I had written about in the previous essays had the same hidden root.

Possession.

Jealousy.

The fear of change.

At first, they looked like different problems. Then I saw they were all expressions of the same instinct…

They were all attempts to control reality.

We try to possess because we want certainty.

We become jealous because we want to control experiences we cannot share.

We resist change because we want the future to resemble our memories.

Even saying, “I know you,” can quietly become another attempt at control—freezing another person into a version of themselves that feels familiar to us.

Then Iris Murdoch quietly dismantled everything I had been thinking.

“Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.”

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I have returned to that sentence many times since I first encountered it. If another person is truly real, then they are infinitely more than the role they play in my story. They have fears I haven’t seen. Thoughts they have never spoken aloud. Dreams that will appear years from now. Versions of themselves that neither of us has met yet. If they are real, they cannot be reduced to my expectations of them.

Murdoch wrote elsewhere that “we live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.”

Perhaps nowhere is that task more difficult than in love.

Love invites fantasy so effortlessly. We imagine forever before tomorrow arrives. We mistake familiarity for understanding. We believe that years spent together guarantee that we continue to know the person standing beside us.

But people do not change only over decades. Sometimes they change after a single conversation.

After grief.

After becoming a parent.

After losing someone they loved.

After reading a book at exactly the right moment.

After travelling alone.

Sometimes they return from an ordinary afternoon carrying a thought that quietly alters the architecture of their inner world forever.

How could I possibly know in advance what life will make of another person?

The more honestly I answered that question, the more another realization followed. I had confused knowing someone for a long time with continuing to know them. Those are not the same thing.

We often say, “I know her.”

“I know him.”

“I know them.”

We say it with affection, even pride, as though the length of a relationship grants us access to another person’s interior world. But perhaps the moment we believe we have finished knowing someone is precisely the moment we stop looking.

This is where Murdoch’s idea of attention becomes more than a philosophical concept. It becomes a daily practice.

Attention as the patient discipline of seeing another person again.

And again.

Not because they have become someone else overnight, but because they were never finished becoming in the first place.

Murdoch inherited this understanding of attention from Simone Weil, who believed that genuine attention is one of the purest forms of generosity we can offer another human being.

I sometimes wonder when I last looked at someone I loved with the curiosity I reserved for them when we first met.

As the years passed in a long-term relationship, somehow I started evaluating them, predicting the outcomes of their actions, turning my knowledge of them into certainty… But less and less simply noticing them.

Pure attention has become so rare that perhaps what many of us long for is not to be understood once, but to be continually seen.

That, I think, is where trust begins.

Not in certainty. Not in guarantees. Not in promises that neither of us can honestly make.

But in a quieter decision:

I would rather encounter the real person than live beside the version of them that exists only inside my imagination.

It is an unusual way of thinking about trust.

We often imagine trust as confidence that someone will never leave, never betray us, never disappoint us. However, I suspect trust begins much earlier.

Perhaps trust is choosing reality over illusion.

You cannot truly trust someone you refuse to see.

Perhaps that is why love is easy, while relationships are difficult.

Love asks only that another person exists.

A relationship asks us to keep meeting that person again and again, long after we believe we already know them.

Writing the first three essays in this series taught me that loving someone means giving up certain comforting illusions.

The illusion that another person belongs to us.

The illusion that we can protect ourselves from every experience that changes them.

The illusion that commitment preserves us from becoming strangers.

I expected the final essay to ask me to surrender one more illusion. Instead, it offered me something in return.

Wonder.

Because if I stop believing that I have finished knowing them, then I get to keep discovering them.

Perhaps love was never meant to solve the mystery of another consciousness.

Perhaps it was meant to protect it.

Not by standing at a distance, but by remaining close enough to notice who the other person is becoming.

Attention cannot guarantee that love will last. It cannot stop two people from growing in different directions, or promise that every story will reach its intended ending.

But perhaps love was never measured by how long it stayed.

Perhaps its quiet miracle is that, for a little while, another person looked at us closely enough to see who we were becoming—and, by seeing us, helped us become more fully ourselves.

And we tried, every day, to do the same for them.

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Earlier in this series

This essay is the final part of a four-part exploration of one question:

What does it mean to love another person without losing yourself—or them?

→ Part I: Does Freedom Bring Us Closer to Love?

→ Part II: When Does Love Become Possession?

→ Part III: Can Love Survive Who We Become?

Getting married and starting a family always felt like the natural course of life. Like many people, I was fascinated by the idea of finding my soulmate—the one person whom the universe had somehow intended for me.

But there was one thing I could never reconcile with that dream.

Many couples who had already found “the one” looked as though they would rather endure anything than another year of their wonderful life together. Their eyes unsettled me. They didn’t look unhappy because of a particular crisis. They looked as though life itself had quietly left them.

It made me wonder whether commitment asks something of us that we rarely speak about.

In the first essay of this series, we talked about Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who believed that commitment should never require us to surrender our freedom. Their relationship challenged many traditional assumptions about love. Yet they didn’t discover a universal formula. Their answer belonged to them.

Which leaves the rest of us with a different question.

What does commitment actually ask us to give up?

Every commitment has a price. Sometimes that price is obvious. We give up other romantic partners. We give up certain places we might have lived, careers we might have pursued, futures that can no longer coexist with the life we’ve chosen.

But there is another sacrifice that is much quieter.

The sacrifice of becoming everyone we might have been.

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard understood this better than almost anyone.

To most of us, choosing one path simply means continuing to walk forward. We rarely notice the roads disappearing behind us. Only years later, when we turn around, do we begin to imagine the lives we never lived.

For Kierkegaard, this wasn’t merely an abstract idea. It became the defining experience of his own life.

He fell deeply in love with Regine Olsen. They became engaged. By all accounts, they loved each other and were expected to marry. Then Kierkegaard broke the engagement.

History still debates whether he did it because he believed his religious calling demanded complete devotion, because he feared marriage itself, or because he thought he would ultimately make Regine unhappy. Whatever the reason, he made a choice that could not be undone.

But what fascinates me isn’t the choice itself. It’s what happened afterward.

Regine slowly ceased to be only the woman he loved. She became something much larger. She became the life he never lived. The husband he never became. The father he never became. The quieter version of himself that disappeared the moment he chose another path.

She became a symbol of possibility itself.

Perhaps that’s why she never truly disappeared from his writing.

Kierkegaard understood that every meaningful choice closes countless other lives. Commitment, in this sense, is not simply giving something up. It is accepting that some versions of ourselves will remain forever unrealized.

For some people, that sacrifice hardly feels like a sacrifice at all. Their values, upbringing, faith, or desires make the decision almost effortless.

For others—especially those drawn to existentialist thought—the question is far more unsettling. Because even after you’ve accepted the price of one choice, another question remains.

What happens when the person who made that choice no longer exists?

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A century later, Friedrich Nietzsche offered an answer that almost sounds like a challenge to Kierkegaard.

“Become who you are.”

At first, the sentence sounds paradoxical. Aren’t we already ourselves?

Nietzsche believed otherwise. He believed that identity is never fixed. Becoming is not a stage we eventually complete but the condition of being alive. Every experience, every loss, every love, every disappointment reshapes us into someone who could not have existed before.

Perhaps the greatest illusion isn’t that we can become everyone.

It’s that we will remain the person who once made a promise.

Every promise is made by a version of ourselves that will eventually disappear. And that, I think, is the deeper challenge of commitment.

We can never fully know who we will become after an existential crisis, after grief, after parenthood, after success, after failure, after falling apart and rebuilding ourselves again. We answer life’s biggest questions only from the perspective of the person we happen to be today.

Our future selves never get a vote.

Perhaps this is why so many relationships quietly begin to fracture.

I don’t think the problem is commitment itself. I think the problem is that our modern understanding of commitment often assumes psychological permanence. We unconsciously expect the people who stood beside us years ago to remain fundamentally the same people forever.

But they won’t.

Neither will we.

How often have we heard someone say,

“I’m leaving because I want to live my life.”

The sentence always sounds selfish. But perhaps what they’re really saying is something much more difficult:

“The person who made that promise is no longer the person standing here.”

Another consequence follows almost invisibly.

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When we believe commitment requires us to stop becoming, every sacrifice we make begins accumulating like an invisible debt. Eventually, our partner becomes responsible for justifying everything we gave up for them.

They must somehow redeem the careers we never pursued.

The cities we never moved to.

The adventures we never had.

The people we never met.

The versions of ourselves we never became.

It is an impossible responsibility.

No human being can compensate for an entire unlived life.

The Swiss philosopher Alain de Botton argues that our culture asks relationships to perform a task they were never designed to accomplish. We inherited, largely from Romanticism, the belief that one extraordinary person should satisfy nearly every emotional, intellectual, psychological, and spiritual longing we possess.

No wonder disappointment feels inevitable.

The problem isn’t that commitment asks too much. It’s that we often sacrifice far more than commitment ever required.

Perhaps we have misunderstood what “forever” means.

Maybe it was never a promise to remain the same people. No one can honestly make such a promise.

Perhaps the promise is something far more demanding.

To keep recognizing one another as we continue becoming strangers to our former selves.

To allow growth without experiencing it as betrayal.

To understand that love isn’t preserving another person’s identity but making room for its transformation.

Because every marriage, every friendship, every lifelong commitment eventually becomes a relationship between two people who did not exist on the day they first said yes.

And perhaps that is the real promise.

Not to protect one another from change.

But to keep choosing one another through it.

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Earlier in this series…

This essay is the third part of a four-part exploration of one question:

What does it mean to love another person without losing yourself—or them?

→ Part I: Does Freedom Bring Us Closer to Love?

→ Part II: When Does Love Become Possession?

Whenever something in my life becomes deeply meaningful, I immediately start wondering how to protect it.

I do it with friendships.

I do it with writing.

And, perhaps most of all, I do it in love.

At first, that instinct seems beautiful. Of course you want to protect the people who make your life better. But recently I’ve started asking myself a different question.

At what point does protecting someone quietly become possessing them?

For a long time, I assumed the answer was obvious.

Possession looked like control. Jealousy. Restricting another person’s freedom.

The usual things.

But the longer I’ve been married, the less convinced I am that possession always announces itself so dramatically.

Sometimes it arrives much more quietly.

Through ordinary routines.

Through habits.

Through love itself.

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Relationships ask a great deal of us.

We invest our time, attention, vulnerability, emotions, and hope. Slowly, almost without noticing, we build a life that neither of us could have created alone.

Maybe that’s because we’re creatures of habit. Or maybe it’s simply because uncertainty is exhausting. Either way, we slowly build our lives around another person’s existence.

Love doesn’t become possession all at once. It happens through hundreds of ordinary moments that slowly teach us to experience another person’s life as part of our own.

I’ve experienced this in surprisingly small ways.

Before we started living together, I wasn’t afraid of sleeping alone.

I actually enjoyed it.

The silence belonged to me.

Then, over the course of a year or so, something changed so gradually I didn’t even notice it happening.

Now, whenever my partner is away, the same house feels strangely unfamiliar. Nothing has changed. The walls are the same. The bedroom is the same.

But the darkness started feeling intimidating.

It takes me a while to remember that, once upon a time, I felt completely at home in that same silence.

Perhaps what I fear losing isn’t the person themselves.

Perhaps it’s the life that exists only when they’re part of it.

That realization made me rethink something else I had always assumed I understood.

Jealousy.

I don’t think the feeling is always about ownership. Or even about the fear of being replaced. Sometimes I wonder whether jealousy begins somewhere else.

I imagine my partner having an experience I’ll never be part of.

A conversation that profoundly changes him.

A place that leaves a permanent mark on him.

A moment of intimacy, joy, grief, or wonder that belongs entirely to someone else.

Nothing immoral has happened. Nothing has been taken from me. Yet something inside me quietly whispers:

I wasn’t there.

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Perhaps what makes jealousy so painful isn’t that someone else touches the person we love.

It’s realizing there are experiences that can shape them forever without us ever being part of them.

Maybe what we call jealousy is sometimes grief over exclusion.

Not exclusion by intention. Just by reality.

No two consciousnesses can ever completely overlap.

No matter how deeply we love one another, there will always be places inside another person’s life where we cannot follow.

That thought unsettles me. Not because I want to own another person. But because I want to witness them.

Perhaps those are not the same thing after all.

Arthur Schopenhauer would probably smile at this observation.

He believed romantic love was far less mysterious than we like to think. What feels deeply personal may simply be nature ensuring our attachment to one another. The intensity, the longing, even the jealousy—they may all serve a biological purpose before they serve an emotional one.

Perhaps he’s right.

Biology explains why attachment begins. But it doesn’t explain how we should love once attachment exists.

For that, I find Erich Fromm much more convincing.

Fromm argued that there are two fundamentally different ways of relating to the world.

One is having.

The other is being.

The person living in the mode of having asks:

How do I keep this?

How do I make sure it doesn’t disappear?

How do I secure it?

The person living in the mode of being asks something entirely different.

How do I experience this while it is here?

The difference seems subtle. I don’t think it is.

One approaches love as possession.

The other approaches love as participation.

One is constantly trying to guarantee tomorrow. The other remains fully present today.

Reading Fromm made me wonder whether possession isn’t really about controlling another person. Perhaps it’s about trying to freeze life itself.

To stop another person from changing.

To stop ourselves from changing.

To preserve a version of “us” that once made us feel safe.

But love refuses to stay still. People continue growing. Experiences continue shaping them. Every conversation, every friendship, every disappointment, every success quietly transforms the person standing beside us.

Maybe that is what makes love so frightening.

You never fall in love with a finished person. You fall in love with someone who will continue becoming someone else.

This is where Simone Weil offers an answer I keep returning to.

She wrote that attention is the purest form of generosity.

Not advice.

Not sacrifice.

Not protection.

Attention.

There is something profoundly different about attending to another person instead of trying to preserve them.

Attention doesn’t ask another person to remain unchanged. It doesn’t insist that every meaningful experience includes us.

It simply says:

I’m here.

I see who you’re becoming.

I’m willing to meet this new version of you.

Perhaps that is the closest we can ever come to sharing another person’s inner world. Not possessing it. Not entering every room of their consciousness. But remaining present at the door whenever they choose to invite us in.

I don’t think there is a universal formula for love.

Every relationship invents its own language. Its own boundaries. Its own understanding of freedom.

The greatest mistake I’ve made is believing that love comes with a script.

Our parents’ script.

Society’s script.

A therapist’s script.

A philosopher’s script.

The longer I’m married, the more convinced I become that every couple eventually has to answer these questions for themselves.

What does freedom mean to us?

What belongs only to me?

What belongs to both of us?

And what kinds of experiences do we accept we’ll never be able to share?

I’ve also stopped thinking of compromise as sacrificing pieces of yourself.

Now it feels more like architecture.

Two people slowly building a space neither could have imagined alone. Not your world. Not mine.

Ours.

Perhaps that’s what belonging has always meant.

Not becoming another person’s possession.

Not possessing them in return.

But creating a life together while accepting that some parts of each other’s inner worlds will always remain beautifully, and painfully, unreachable.

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The war is over. The city is free again, but nothing feels settled. An entire generation has watched old certainties collapse. If there was ever a moment to ask how life should be lived, this was it.

Sometimes history changes because a philosopher asks a profound question.

Sometimes it changes because two philosophers happen to meet in college.

You walk into Les Deux Magots, one of the busiest cafés in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Every table is occupied except one. Around you, conversations about literature, politics, and the future fill the room.

At the next table sits a man with thick glasses and a woman who seems to challenge every sentence he says. They are completely absorbed in one another.

They are Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

Once I discovered them, I couldn’t stop thinking about their relationship.

Not because they had an open relationship or because they rejected marriage.

But because I thought they had solved one of love’s oldest dilemmas.

Can two people love each other deeply without trying to own each other?

Their answer was radical.

They remained each other’s “essential” partners for more than fifty years while allowing each other other relationships. They believed that genuine love required two things above all else: freedom and honesty.

At first, I found that idea irresistible. It felt intellectually elegant.

If another person is truly free, why should love require possession?

If love is real, why should honesty ever threaten it?

The more I read about them, the more I wondered whether they had discovered a better way to love than the rest of us.

Then I read Simone de Beauvoir’s letters.

I expected philosophy.

Instead, I found two painfully recognizable human beings.

Her letters are full of longing, jealousy, tenderness, insecurity, and the quiet fear of losing the person she loved most. Sartre experienced his own forms of jealousy and emotional dependence throughout his life as well.

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Their letters made me wonder whether they had simply discovered a different way to suffer.

That realization stayed with me for weeks.

The more I thought about it, the less interested I became in whether their relationship “worked.”

A different question had taken its place.

Are radical honesty and radical freedom always moral virtues in romantic love?

To understand why these ideas mattered so much to them, you don’t need a lecture on existentialism. You only need one idea.

Sartre believed that human beings are radically free. We are not born with a fixed purpose. We become ourselves through the choices we make.

If that’s true, then loving someone means respecting their freedom to continue becoming who they are—even when that journey takes them somewhere you didn’t expect.

I still find that idea beautiful.

Perhaps the greatest act of love is leaving another person enough space to change.

After all, none of us is the same person we were ten or twenty years ago.

The trouble is that freedom doesn’t eliminate emotion. It simply refuses to protect us from it.

Reading Simone’s letters, I kept thinking about Erich Fromm.

In The Art of Loving, Fromm argues that love is not something we have but something we practice. Most of us confuse loving with possessing. We don’t only want another person’s happiness.

We want certainty.

We want exclusivity.

We want reassurance.

Sometimes, if we’re honest, we simply want to know that we matter more than everyone else.

We often say that love shouldn’t be possessive. Yet somewhere beneath that conviction lives another desire: to remain someone’s first choice.

Perhaps that is the tension that has always haunted love.

Not freedom versus commitment.

But freedom versus the quiet hope of being irreplaceable.

Perhaps jealousy isn’t simply the desire to possess another person. Perhaps it’s the fear of becoming replaceable.

Sartre and Beauvoir weren’t trying to possess each other. They were trying to build a love that left both people completely free. The difficulty is that freedom doesn’t erase our desire to feel irreplaceable.

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Around that time, I stumbled upon Martin Buber.

Reading him felt strangely comforting.

Unlike Sartre, Buber wasn’t asking how two people remain free. He was asking something else entirely.

How do two people truly meet?

He believed that love begins when we stop relating to another person as something to understand, manage, or possess, and instead encounter them as a whole human being.

The more I thought about Sartre and Buber, the less interested I became in deciding which one was right.

Maybe every relationship spends its entire life trying to balance both questions.

How do we remain free?

How do we remain present?

I still admire Sartre and Beauvoir.

Just not for the reasons I once did.

I no longer admire them because I think they had found the perfect relationship. I admire them because they had the courage to live according to their philosophy, even when reality exposed its contradictions.

Their letters reminded me that no philosophy exempts us from being human.

Freedom cannot eliminate vulnerability.

Honesty cannot eliminate jealousy.

Perhaps love isn’t measured by how much freedom we grant another person. Nor by how many truths we are willing to tell.

Perhaps it is measured by something far more difficult…

How much responsibility are we willing to accept for another person’s inner world?

I’m still not sure where I stand. But I know this much.

I began reading Sartre and Beauvoir because I thought they had the answers. I finished reading them with better questions. And I suspect that’s a far more valuable place to begin.

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I have a feeling Sartre and Beauvoir only opened the first door. Over the next few weeks, I’d like to keep walking through the others.

This essay begins a four-part exploration of one question:

What does it mean to love another person without losing yourself—or them?

Next week, we’ll explore a tension that has haunted love for centuries:

When does love become possession?

A fear of missing something important.

Earlier in my life, I explained it to myself as a fear of not becoming the person I was supposed to become. If only I worked harder. If only I had made better choices. If only I had found my purpose sooner. I believed that one day I would finally arrive at the correct version of myself and the anxiety would disappear.

Years later, after chasing many of my dreams and making some of them come true, I realized an uncomfortable truth.

The fear was not going anywhere.

Instead, it was transforming into something more complicated.

We usually picture our lives as finite straight lines. We are born, we go to school, we choose a profession, we build careers, we fall in love, we marry, we have children, we grow old, and we die. The details differ from person to person, but the structure remains surprisingly similar.

What if the mistake is not the picture itself, but the way we look at it?

What if the only thing that remains constant throughout our lives is the body carrying us through them?

What if one lifetime already contains many different lives?

I promised to be completely exposed in this essay, so here we go…

My biggest fear is not failure. It is living a life that excludes too many other lives.

It is the realization that every role I embrace requires me to abandon countless others.

Our society has normalized the idea that identity should be stable. We are expected to decide who we are, announce it to the world, and remain consistent. We choose careers, political beliefs, lifestyles, social circles, and relationship structures. Then we spend years defending those choices as proof that we know ourselves.

I often wonder at what age this expectation truly begins. The answer, I suspect, is somewhere around the end of high school. That is the moment when society gathers around us and demands an answer.

Who are you going to be?

What are you going to study?

What career are you going to pursue?

The choice feels temporary when we make it. Yet it quietly determines the next decade of our lives. One decision becomes a profession. A profession becomes a social circle. A social circle becomes a worldview. Before we realize it, an entire identity has formed around a choice made by someone barely old enough to understand themselves.

The strange thing is that even when those choices are good, even when they lead to a meaningful and fulfilling life, something remains unsettled.

Some of us continue to feel restless…

Not because we dislike the life we built. But because we remain fascinated by the lives we didn’t choose.

What surprises me is how stubbornly we ignore the purpose of this restlessness. Throughout history, some of the greatest thinkers devoted their lives to understanding this feeling.

According to Heraclitus, everything changes.

“No man ever steps into the same river twice.”

I have always loved this metaphor.

The river changes.

The person changes.

The relationship changes.

The world changes.

If we are constantly changing, perhaps we never meet the same person twice either.

The relationship changes because both people keep dying and being reborn psychologically.

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More than two thousand years later, Virginia Woolf arrived at a similar conclusion from a different direction.

She suspected that the self was not singular at all. Not a statue carved once and forever, but a collection of shifting selves moving through time.

The older I get, the less I believe personality is something we possess. It feels more like a conversation between all the people we have been. Some of them still speak louder than others.

We spend years searching for who we are, only to discover that we keep becoming someone else.

Not long ago, a close friend shared an observation during one of our regular philosophical debates.

“I feel like I could have completely different relationships with the same people if I met them at different periods of my life.”

At first, the idea sounded obvious.

Then it became disturbing.

Your high school nemesis could become the love of your life if you met twenty years later.

The person whose approval you desperately sought at nineteen could become an acquaintance at forty.

A friendship that once defined your world might become a memory.

A stranger could become family.

If Heraclitus was right, perhaps we are not simply meeting different people throughout our lives. Perhaps we are meeting different versions of the same people.

Even when a relationship continues uninterrupted, it still transforms.

The best example I can think of is my relationship with my parents. There was a time when they were my protectors. Then they became authority figures. Then opponents. Then teachers. Now, increasingly, they are becoming friends. Each stage feels like a different relationship entirely.

And the thought that this stage is also finite makes me cry every single time.

When I look closely, I realize that one relationship has already contained many relationships. One life has already contained many lives.

Yet if this is true, why does the feeling remain? Why do we still feel drawn toward unlived lives?

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The Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, called anxiety “the dizziness of freedom.”

Not because we fear what will happen.

Because we become aware of possibility.

For a brief moment, we stand before the abyss of countless futures, knowing that any one of them could become our life. That realization is both exhilarating and terrifying.

Every possibility contains a different self.

Then we choose.

And the others become ghosts.

This is where possibility becomes loss.

Jean-Paul Sartre pushed this idea even further. For him, every choice was simultaneously a creation and a loss. To become someone is to abandon countless other versions of yourself. Perhaps this is why freedom feels heavier than we expected. Every decision commits us to one life while quietly burying many others.

And this is where philosophy stops being abstract.

The truth is, I do not want every possible life.

But I want more than one.

I want to be a successful entrepreneur.

A prolific novelist and essayist.

A theater director and a playwright.

A political journalist and an activist.

A traveler photographing the Arctic for National Geographic.

I want a family, and I also want freedom.

I want roots, and I want wings.

As you can see, some of these desires contradict one another.

Even if I master productivity, discipline, and time management, it is highly unlikely that I will become everything on this list.

Perhaps some unlived lives are simply the price of choosing any life at all.

For a long time, I measured my existence by the lives I would never get to experience. Then it occurred to me that perhaps I was counting incorrectly. I was counting the lives I would never live. I wasn’t counting the lives I already had.

I have been a daughter.

A student.

An immigrant.

A wife.

A friend.

But I have also lived several different relationships with the same people.

Different daughters to the same parents.

Different versions of a friend to the same friends.

Different versions of myself within the same marriage.

Each role changed the way I experienced reality. Each of them introduced me to people I would never have met otherwise and taught me something the previous version of me could not understand.

I finally realized that what I feared missing was not an experience.

It was a version of myself.

Maybe this is what we miss when we obsess over alternative futures. We forget how many versions of ourselves have already existed.

Perhaps the miracle is not that we are given only one life. Perhaps the miracle is that one life is capable of containing so many.

We lose entire versions of ourselves and gain new ones. We mourn people who shared our names. And then we become someone new.

For a long time, I thought the solution was to experience more.

More places.

More careers.

More identities.

More lives.

But perhaps the tragedy is not that I will never live all those other lives.

Perhaps the tragedy would be refusing to fully live the one I have because I was too busy grieving the others.

The truth is, I still think about them—the countless versions of myself hidden behind different choices. I suspect I always will. But I am beginning to understand that their absence does not diminish the life I have. It gives it shape. Every unlived life is evidence of a life chosen.

After all, this life still has people left to meet, including future versions of myself.

I do not need ten lifetimes.

I only need enough courage to keep changing.

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I didn’t understand the point of waking up early every morning and going to a place where adults judged children based on how well they understood other adults’ explanations. Most of the process felt arbitrary to me. The bells, the grades, the routines, the endless repetition of information that seemed disconnected from real life.

But more than anything, school distracted me from reading.

Books were the universe I actually lived in. While other children were waiting for the final bell, I was waiting to return to the novel hidden in my backpack. The family library became a second home. I read indiscriminately and without a system. Classics stood beside adventure stories. Philosophy shared shelves with romances. Every book felt like a door, and there were far more doors than I could ever open.

One day during English literature class, the routine was unfolding as usual. Then the teacher asked who had read Ivanhoe by Walter Scott.

I raised my hand.

A strange silence filled the room. Everyone turned around and looked at me.

The book was mandatory reading, and apparently, I was the only student in the group who had actually read it.

I remember feeling embarrassed rather than proud. I hadn’t read it because it was assigned. I had read it because it was there.

The teacher looked at me and said something I have remembered for years:

“You’re the nation’s treasure.”

At the time, the comment felt exaggerated, and I felt grateful my classmates didn’t hate me for it.

Many years later, after a full day of work, trying to read and write late at night when I am not too exhausted, I find it increasingly difficult to believe those words.

One of the strangest contradictions of modern life is that we spend twelve years convincing children that literature matters and the rest of our lives acting as if it doesn’t.

We tell students that novels are important. We design entire educational systems around them. We write essays about them, analyze them, and test children on them.

Then adulthood arrives.

Suddenly, literature becomes optional. A luxury. A hobby. Something to consume if there is time left after work, emails, errands, meetings, and scrolling.

At some point, we collectively decided that literature belongs to childhood.

I am not sure we ever stopped to ask why.

The more I think about it, the more convinced I become that we have forgotten the role fiction writers play in society.

We increasingly treat literature as entertainment.

But for most of human history, literature was something much larger than that. It was one of the primary ways civilizations preserved emotional knowledge.

Leo Tolstoy wrote that the purpose of art is to transmit feelings from one person to another. At first glance, the idea sounds simple. But if we take it seriously, literature becomes one of humanity’s most remarkable inventions.

A human life is short.

Painfully short.

I can live only one life. I can occupy only one body. I can experience only one sequence of events.

Yet through literature, I can borrow thousands of others.

I can witness nineteenth-century Russia through Tolstoy. I can descend into the moral labyrinths of Dostoevsky. I can see the world through the eyes of people separated from me by centuries, continents, religions, classes, and circumstances.

No other medium has preserved human experience across generations with such depth.

Literature may be the closest thing we have to a shared emotional memory. It preserves not only what people knew, but also how they experienced being alive.

When I read a great novel, I am often struck by how little the fundamental questions have changed.

People worried about status long before LinkedIn. They struggled with loneliness long before social media. They searched for meaning long before self-help books.

The technologies change. The vocabulary changes. The circumstances change.

Yet the essential questions remain remarkably familiar.

How should I live?

What is worth sacrificing for?

What does it mean to love another person?

How do I survive loss?

Why am I here?

Literature does not answer these questions once and for all.

It simply reminds us that we are not the first people to ask them.

In that sense, every great novel is an invitation into a conversation that began long before we arrived and will continue long after we are gone.

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Yet literature does more than connect us to previous generations.

It changes the quality of attention we bring to our own lives.

People often speak about reading as if it were a passive activity. In reality, reading great literature is one of the most active mental exercises available to us.

A complex novel does not simply tell us what happens. It asks us to interpret motives, resolve contradictions, recognize symbols, anticipate consequences, and constantly revise our judgments.

We become participants rather than spectators.

In a strange way, readers become co-authors of meaning.

This is one reason great novels remain alive long after their publication. Different readers discover different truths inside the same pages. A book that feels ordinary at twenty may feel devastating at forty. The text remains the same, but the person reading it does not.

George Eliot understood this better than most writers. Her novels were never really about events. They were about consciousness itself—the hidden motives, misunderstandings, ambitions, disappointments, and self-deceptions beneath ordinary life.

She understood that people rarely know themselves as well as they imagine.

Every great novel is a mirror disguised as a window.

We begin reading because we want to understand someone else. Somewhere along the way, we discover that we have been studying ourselves. Perhaps this explains why certain books arrive at exactly the right moment in our lives.

They do not necessarily give us new experiences. More often, they give us a language for experiences we have already had.

A character’s mistake suddenly looks familiar. A conflict feels uncomfortably personal. A passage illuminates something we have felt for years but never managed to articulate. Someone who died a century ago appears to understand us.

Not because they knew us.

Because they knew people.

And literature gives us the rare opportunity to observe ourselves from a distance.

To notice our contradictions.

To recognize our patterns.

To become slightly less mysterious to ourselves.

Literature preserves human experience across time.

It deepens our understanding of ourselves.

But its third contribution may be the most overlooked of all.

Literature expands language.

And language expands reality.

I recently came across an article discussing Shakespeare’s contribution to the English language. Hundreds of words and expressions entered common usage because one writer was attempting to describe human experience with greater precision.

After reading it, I found myself wondering something I could not answer.

Who was the last writer who significantly expanded our language?

Not our technical vocabulary. Not the language of software, startups, algorithms, platforms, and artificial intelligence.

The language we use to understand ourselves.

The answer did not come easily.

Meanwhile, technology introduces new words every year. Entire industries emerge and bring their own vocabulary with them. We have developed increasingly sophisticated ways to describe machines, systems, and digital environments.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that.

Yet I find it fascinating that our vocabulary for technology continues to expand while our vocabulary for inner life often feels neglected.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously wrote that the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

Most people interpret this as a statement about communication.

I increasingly suspect it is also a statement about perception.

We struggle to examine experiences for which we lack language. We can feel them, but we cannot quite hold them in front of ourselves and look at them directly. They remain vague, unfinished, and difficult to understand.

Before an experience enters language, it often exists only as a feeling.

Someone must find the words.

For centuries, this has been one of the writer’s most important responsibilities. Not merely telling stories. Finding distinctions. Naming realities. Articulating subtle states of being. Giving shape to experiences that people recognize immediately once they encounter them on the page.

Many of the most important contributions of literature are almost invisible.

A new invention is easy to notice.

A new building is easy to notice.

A new technology is easy to notice.

A new way of understanding loneliness is not.

A new distinction between desire and love, admiration and envy, freedom and isolation is not.

Yet these things alter the landscape of human experience just as profoundly. Perhaps even more so.

This is one reason I continue returning to writers such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Not because they entertain me. Though they certainly do.

I return because they help me perceive more.

They notice things I might have overlooked. They distinguish between emotions I might otherwise lump together. They reveal motives hidden beneath motives. They bring clarity to parts of human experience that often resist explanation.

Reading them feels less like consuming a story and more like acquiring additional ways of seeing.

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And when language becomes narrower, something else seems to narrow with it. Certain distinctions disappear. Complex experiences become harder to articulate. Nuance gradually gives way to categories. Labels begin replacing descriptions. Ready-made opinions begin replacing observations.

George Orwell worried deeply about this tendency.

His concern was never simply political.

It was linguistic.

He understood that language is not merely a tool we use to describe reality. It also shapes the way reality appears to us. When language loses precision, thought often loses precision alongside it.

A society does not become less thoughtful overnight. The process is slower than that. The vocabulary contracts. Certain distinctions disappear. Some experiences become harder to discuss while others become impossible to express at all.

Eventually, people stop noticing what they can no longer name.

Perhaps this is why I keep returning to literature after all these years. Not because novels help me escape reality. Quite the opposite. They help me notice more of it.

They make certain feelings easier to recognize. Certain questions easier to ask. Certain experiences easier to understand.

Maybe that is what writers have always done.

They help us see what was already there.

Long before societies know what they feel, writers often do.

And long after societies disappear, it is often the writers who remain, quietly teaching future generations how to see.

And somewhere, I still like to imagine a child sitting in the back of a classroom with a novel hidden beneath the desk, waiting for the school day to end.

This morning, I was sitting on a terrace with a cup of coffee and a philosophical text that refused to be rushed. The air was warm and smelled faintly of cut grass and summer flowers. Birds were carrying on with the business of being birds.

It was, by all reasonable standards, a perfect morning.

And yet part of me kept insisting that I should be doing something else.

Something useful.

For nearly an hour, I had nothing to show for my time except a few underlined sentences and a handful of thoughts. Which, according to the strange logic of modern life, can begin to feel dangerously close to doing nothing at all.

The thought felt absurd. I was reading philosophy on a Sunday morning. If there is such a thing as an intellectually respectable way to spend one’s time, surely this was it. Yet the feeling remained. Reading a novel would have felt less justified. Sitting beneath a tree and watching the clouds drift by would have felt even worse.

I have noticed this feeling more often lately. Not only in myself but in people around me. We explain our leisure as though we are defending it. We mention what we learned from a book, what a walk did for our mental health, and how much work we completed before allowing ourselves an evening off.

Sometimes I catch myself doing the same thing. I exaggerate how busy I have been. I make sure people know I worked hard this week before mentioning that I spent an afternoon reading or wandering through a city with no destination in mind.

It is a strange habit.

Somewhere along the way, leisure stopped being a normal part of life and became something that requires justification.

Blaise Pascal once wrote that all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone. I think he was right. Human beings have always struggled with stillness because stillness eventually brings us face-to-face with ourselves.

But I think our version of the problem is slightly different.

The modern difficulty is not simply that we fear silence. It is that we have attached guilt to it.

We have become uncomfortable with any activity that cannot immediately explain its usefulness.

I was born in a culture where long conversations, afternoons in cafés, reading for pleasure, and unhurried walks were considered ordinary parts of life. Not achievements. Not self-care practices. Not productivity strategies. Just life.

What alarms me is how quickly these spaces are disappearing. Not because they are being taken from us, but because we are surrendering them ourselves.

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In 1932, Bertrand Russell published an essay called In Praise of Idleness. Russell argued that modern society had elevated work far beyond its proper place and forgotten the value of leisure. What I find fascinating is that one of the most productive intellectuals of the twentieth century felt compelled to defend idleness at all.

Nearly a century later, his argument feels even more relevant.

Not because we work more hours than previous generations, but because the logic of work has begun to colonise everything else.

A quiet evening must become self-improvement.

A hobby must become a side business.

A walk must become an exercise.

Even rest is expected to justify itself.

The result is not that we become more fulfilled. It is that we lose the ability to spend time without measuring it.

The philosopher Josef Pieper offered a beautiful alternative. In Leisure: The Basis of Culture, he described leisure not as laziness but as receptivity—the willingness to be present without immediately trying to turn the experience into something useful.

I find myself returning to this idea often.

A person reading literary fiction is doing something strangely unproductive. A novel rarely offers a clear lesson. It cannot always be summarised into advice or converted into a practical outcome. Yet years later, a character may still live inside your mind. A sentence may continue shaping the way you see the world.

The same is true of philosophy, art, friendship, and many of the experiences that give life its depth.

They require a receptive mind.

They require us to spend time with things whose value cannot be calculated in advance.

This may also explain why so many important ideas emerge during moments that appear wasted.

Keats wrote Ode to a Nightingale during a morning spent sitting in a garden. Einstein’s breakthroughs began as thought experiments rather than research plans. Insights often arrive while walking, staring out a train window, or lying awake at night long after we have stopped searching for them.

The modern defence of leisure usually sounds like this: rest so you can become more productive.

I understand the argument, but I think it misses something essential. The point is not that wasted time helps us work better.

The point is that some of the most meaningful things in life emerge from time that cannot be justified beforehand.

No productivity system would have scheduled them. No efficiency expert would have recommended them. From the outside, they looked like wasted time.

The first article on this Substack was written on a Sunday afternoon when nothing particularly important was happening. I had no deadline, no plan, and no grand strategy. By modern standards, it was an entirely unremarkable afternoon.

And yet something happened.

A voice appeared. A character emerged. A story began.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder how many important things in our lives begin this way—during hours we almost talked ourselves out of having.

I am writing this essay from a corner of the world that still remembers what it means to be human before being productive. A place where people still linger over coffee and spend entire evenings talking without checking what they gained from the experience.

I hope we do not lose that completely.

Not because work is unimportant. Not because ambition is wrong.

But because there is something profoundly human about spending time on things that have no purpose beyond themselves.

Even now, on a hot summer day, I find myself making a small resolution.

I do not want to feel guilty for doing puzzles in silence instead of listening to a podcast.

I want to enjoy birdsong without turning it into a lesson.

I want to read novels that offer no obvious return on investment.

I want to protect the parts of myself that do not exist to produce.

Because culture, friendship, reflection, creativity, and love all depend on the same fragile thing:

time that appears wasted before it reveals what it was for.

So let me leave you with one question.

What have you been postponing until you have more time?

What would happen if you wasted an afternoon on it instead?

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There are people whose absence we feel in ways that make very little sense.

We do not miss their touch. We do not miss a future we might have built together. What we miss is a conversation that will never happen. A question they would have asked. An observation nobody else would have made. A particular way our own minds seemed to work in their presence.

There is a feeling that periodically returns to me like an old ache. It settles somewhere deep in my chest and becomes almost unbearable. Perhaps it never truly leaves. Perhaps it simply becomes audible whenever the noise around me finally subsides.

We have collectively agreed to divide human relationships into a few familiar categories: romantic, platonic, and professional.

Everything we feel toward other people is expected to fit somewhere within these boundaries. Every attachment, affection, admiration, and longing must eventually find its place on one of these shelves. We move through life assuming that the available vocabulary is sufficient for the full complexity of human experience.

But what happens when a feeling refuses to fit?

What happens when an experience belongs to none of the categories we have available?

This essay is about a form of connection that many people have experienced, but few know how to describe: intellectual intimacy.

I mean the fascination with another person’s way of thinking. The attraction to a mind rather than a body. The rare experience of meeting someone in whose presence conversation feels effortless, not because you agree with one another, but because thought itself seems to become easier.

You find yourself expressing ideas you did not know you carried. Exploring parts of your own mind that usually remain inaccessible. The discussion moves somewhere unexpected, and somewhere along the way, you realise that you are not merely exchanging ideas. You are discovering yourself through another consciousness.

Most strangely of all, in the presence of this person, you feel more like yourself than almost anywhere else.

Years after meeting certain people, I often find myself still having imaginary conversations with them. Not because I wish to see them again. Not even because I necessarily agree with them. But when I encounter a difficult question, I still wonder how they would approach it. Their way of thinking becomes part of my own interior world.

This experience is not absent from philosophy. In fact, philosophy has been circling it for centuries.

Plato encountered it in The Symposium. Through the voice of Diotima, he describes an ascent from attraction to beautiful bodies toward admiration of beautiful minds and, eventually, toward Beauty itself. Yet whenever I return to the text, I find myself lingering on the step Plato seems eager to leave behind.

Plato recognised that minds can attract us as powerfully as bodies. He understood that intelligence, perception, and character can become objects of admiration and desire. Yet he treated this encounter as part of a larger journey toward something universal.

I suspect he underestimated the step.

Entire lives have been altered by encounters that never progressed beyond it. Not because they failed to become something greater, but because they already were.

For many people, the encounter with a particular mind is not a stage on the way to abstraction. It is one of the most meaningful experiences available to us.

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Aristotle comes closer still.

His highest form of friendship emerges when two people value one another for who they fundamentally are. Unlike friendships based on utility or pleasure, these relationships are grounded in mutual admiration of character.

Yet even here, I sense something more specific hiding beneath the surface.

We do not merely admire another person’s virtues. We become attached to their judgment, their curiosity, their imagination, their peculiar habits of attention. We grow fascinated by the way they arrive at conclusions, the questions they ask, and the details they notice.

What draws us is not intelligence in the abstract but a particular consciousness.

A particular way of seeing.

The delight of encountering a mind that feels simultaneously familiar and irreducibly different from our own.

Philosophy recognised many aspects of this experience. What it never fully developed was a distinct category devoted specifically to it.

Perhaps that is because intellectual intimacy rarely fits comfortably into social categories.

Modern culture tends to interpret intense attachment through only a handful of familiar narratives. We possess elaborate rituals for romantic love. We celebrate engagements, weddings, anniversaries, and heartbreaks. Friendship receives less attention, but it still occupies a recognised place in the social world.

Intellectual intimacy has almost none.

There is no established script for meeting the person whose mind quietly changes the architecture of your own.

No vocabulary for explaining why a conversation can feel life-changing without being romantic. No cultural framework for understanding why somebody can become deeply important to us without occupying any conventional role in our lives.

As a result, these connections often become invisible.

We mistake them for romance because that is the closest category available. We diminish them to friendship because that feels safer. We struggle to explain them even to ourselves.

This is where Simone Weil offers perhaps the most illuminating insight.

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Weil believed that attention is among the rarest forms of love. To truly attend to another person requires more than admiration or agreement. It means resisting the temptation to reduce them to our expectations and assumptions. It means making room for another consciousness as it is.

Her idea reveals something important about intellectual intimacy.

Its foundation is not admiration.

It is attention.

The initial excitement of meeting a remarkable mind is not hard to come by. Novelty is easy. Fascination is easy. Recognition is easy.

What is difficult is continuing to pay attention.

Continuing to listen after the novelty fades. Remaining curious when disagreement appears. Continuing to care about another person’s way of seeing the world, even when it challenges your own. Remaining willing to be surprised.

Many people wish to be understood.

Far fewer are willing to practice understanding.

The deepest intellectual relationships require precisely that discipline. Not agreement. Not similarity. Not even admiration.

Attention.

Perhaps this is why such connections feel so rare.

They ask us to value curiosity over certainty. Understanding over self-expression. They require enough humility to admit that another consciousness may contain something we lack.

The absence of words for certain forms of connection does more than impoverish language. It impoverishes our ability to perceive.

Without concepts, reflection becomes difficult. Without language, experience remains trapped inside sensation. We are left carrying emotions we can feel but cannot adequately describe.

And what cannot be described is often misunderstood.

Experiences that do not fit familiar categories are repeatedly met with simplification, suspicion, or judgment. We force them into existing narratives because uncertainty makes us uncomfortable. Yet there is a cost to this.

If we cannot recognise the value of something that does not exist in our vocabulary, how can we protect it? How can we nurture it, preserve it, or allow it to develop into its fullest form?

Language does not merely describe reality. It influences what becomes visible within it.

When a form of connection remains unnamed, it becomes harder to seek, harder to understand, and easier to lose.

How many relationships have you encountered that never quite fit the accepted categories? How many conversations altered the course of your thinking without becoming romance or friendship in the conventional sense? How many people have entered your life and awakened something within you that had no name, and therefore no place to belong?

We often assume loneliness comes from the absence of people.

I am no longer certain that it does.

Sometimes loneliness comes from the absence of recognition. From carrying an experience for which no adequate language exists. From meeting someone who changed the way you think, and having no socially accepted explanation for why that mattered so much.

Perhaps this is the hidden cost of an impoverished vocabulary.

What we cannot name becomes difficult to discuss. What we cannot discuss becomes difficult to understand. What we cannot understand becomes easy to lose.

And so some of the most meaningful connections of our lives disappear without ever being fully seen—even by the people who experienced them.

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This essay is an excerpt from a longer inquiry I have been living with for some time now.

If it resonated with you, my debut novel — You Are the Journey, coming October 2026 — follows that same thread into deeper territory. A link for a free pre-order will appear here on Substack soon. Subscribe to stay in touch.

“And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy.”

I opened Symposium this morning, trying once again to catch that elusive thought which always escaped you. Just as you used to, I reached the Ladder of Love only to close the book midway and remain sitting there for some time, watching the steam disappear from my tea.

The question of love always left you strangely absent from the room. Not distant but suspended somewhere beyond language. You could discuss politics, history, death, even God, with remarkable precision, yet love reduced you to silence and unfinished sentences in the margins of books.

Perhaps that was the closest anyone ever came to understanding it.

You spent years trying to explain who we were to one another. I think now it was never the feeling itself that troubled you, only the inadequacy of words around it. Every philosophy attempts its own definition. Every discipline approaches it from another angle. Yet none seem capable of fully describing what occurs when another mind begins quietly inhabiting your own.

It never disturbed me that we lacked a name for it.

But this morning something shifted inside me.

The sunlight was unbearably bright against the windowpanes, and still I felt cold—as though some invisible door inside the world had closed during the night.

I realized then that love may not belong solely to the physical world after all. People speak of it as though its highest expression is marriage, shared homes, and children carrying fragments of us into the future. There is beauty in that. A kind of earthly devotion.

But other forms of love seem to exist almost entirely beyond touch.

What you gave me was far beyond the ordinary sense. You witnessed me. Not the version arranged for society, but the hidden movement beneath it—the contradictions, the unfinished thoughts, the private fears disguised as ideas. With others, conversation often felt like translation. With you, it felt like remembering.

I still recall that winter afternoon in Vienna when snow collected soundlessly along the edges of the pavement, and you stopped in the middle of a sentence because you had suddenly understood something. You never told me what it was. You simply looked at me with that expression I can no longer describe without feeling the years inside my chest.

I think, perhaps, you understood this before I did:

that consciousness is less solitary than we fear.

A human mind can continue itself inside another person. Thought by thought, letter by letter, until the boundary between self and other grows uncertain.

My mind continues in you, and yours in me.

Not metaphorically. As memory. As perception. As influence so deeply woven into thought that even now, when I encounter an idea beautiful enough to wound me, I still turn instinctively toward you before remembering.

And tell me—who could claim we did not share a life?

We shared something stranger than life. We shared interiority. Years of trembling understanding preserved in paper, in silence, in the long pauses between one letter and the next.

You gave me the freedom to remain unfinished.

Now the evenings arrive earlier than they once did. Books gather in taller stacks beside the chair. Sometimes I still catch myself setting aside passages to send you before the silence returns and reminds me that there is no address left for your name.

Still, I will send this letter.

Because I have begun to suspect that immortality is not found in legacy, in children, or in monuments, but in the quiet persistence of one consciousness within another, long after the body has disappeared.

Yours,
G

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It straightens its posture while the elevator climbs. It rehearses expressions in the black reflection of a darkened phone screen. It knows how long to hold eye contact and when to laugh softly enough to appear effortless. It knows what to say when someone asks how you are. Fine. Busy. Good, really. It enters conversations already edited.

By now, it moves with such precision that you no longer notice the performance. The gestures feel natural. The voice feels like yours. The role has been rehearsed so thoroughly that it no longer resembles acting at all.

The question is not whether this version of you is false.

The question is whether you remember what came before it.

Every person performs. The philosophical question is not whether the performance is authentic—it is whether the performer still exists behind it.

We spend so much of our lives learning how to be seen that we rarely ask who is doing the seeing from within. The self is not discovered beneath the mask like an artifact waiting under dust. It is built, painfully and deliberately, through the act of recognising which masks have become prisons and choosing which ones to refuse.

This is where Erving Goffman begins.

Goffman understood social life as theatre. Every interaction, in his view, is a kind of stagecraft: we manage impressions, construct personas, adjust our language and posture depending on the audience before us. A dinner party requires one version of the self. A workplace—another. Even intimacy has its scripts.

Goffman’s insight remains unsettling because it feels undeniably true. Human beings perform constantly. We curate moods. We soften contradictions. We anticipate judgment before it arrives.

But Goffman describes what happens. He does not ask what it costs.

The danger is not the existence of the performance. The danger is forgetting. When a role becomes continuous enough, the distance between the self and the role begins to collapse. The performance ceases to feel intentional. It hardens into identity.

I did not fully understand this until I began creating characters who had worn their masks for so long that they no longer remembered the shape of their real selves.

He becomes the kind of man everyone can rely on, and nobody can reach. Calm in every crisis. Useful in every room. He mistakes restraint for strength until he no longer knows how to speak without organising himself first.

She becomes impossible not to like. Charming, warm, endlessly self-aware. She turns every confession into humour before it can become exposure, every intimate moment into something lighter, safer, easier to escape. People leave conversations with her feeling close to her while knowing almost nothing about her.

What once protected them slowly begins to replace them. Reliability hardens into rigidity. Independence becomes an inability to ask for help. Discipline survives long after tenderness has disappeared.

These are not lies exactly. That is what makes them dangerous.

The most convincing masks are the ones stitched carefully from real traits. They fit closely enough to become indistinguishable from skin.

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Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote: “Become who you are.”

The phrase is usually treated like encouragement, a polished slogan for self-actualisation. But Nietzsche’s warning is sharper than that. You cannot become who you are if you cannot distinguish yourself from what has merely been inherited, rehearsed, rewarded, or feared into existence.

Most people never become who they are because the performance works too well.

A role that protects you is difficult to abandon. The controlled person is admired for competence. The detached person is praised for independence. The agreeable person is loved for never asking too much. Society rewards functional performances long before it rewards self-knowledge.

And so the mask begins to feel moral.

Nietzsche understood identity not as discovery but as creation. There is no pure self hidden beneath social conditioning waiting to be excavated intact. There is only the frightening responsibility of authorship. To become who you are requires first recognising what you are performing—and then enduring the instability that follows when the performance loosens.

This recognition often arrives quietly. Not dramatically, but in fractures.

A sentence that feels strangely rehearsed while you are saying it. A moment alone after a party, where silence feels unfamiliar. The sudden awareness that you no longer know whether your reactions are spontaneous or expected. Sometimes it arrives in relationships, when another person’s intimacy threatens the structure of the role itself. To be loved deeply is terrifying because love notices repetition. It sees the choreography.

And once seen, the performance cannot return entirely to invisibility.

This is where Simone de Beauvoir offers something close to redemption.

De Beauvoir’s idea of the authentic project does not demand the impossible fantasy of existing without roles. She understands that identity is always situated within society, expectations, and performance. The task is not to escape the stage. The task is to recognise that you are on one.

For de Beauvoir, bad faith occurs when we deny our freedom by treating our roles as inevitable. The person who says, “This is simply who I am,” often means: this is the role I learned so early that I no longer experience it as a choice.

Authenticity, then, is not rawness. It is not confession without structure or some purified self untouched by influence. Authenticity is the moment the performance becomes conscious.

The role may remain, but it changes once chosen deliberately.

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The reliable man may still care through action, but no longer hides behind usefulness to avoid emotional risk. The woman who cultivated distance may still value freedom, but cease using ambiguity as protection against vulnerability. The performance is no longer an unconscious reflex. It becomes authored.

This is freedom in de Beauvoir’s sense: not liberation from all masks, but the acknowledgment that you are wearing one.

Because the mask itself is not the enemy.

The forgetting is.

Some people move through life so seamlessly inside their performances that they never encounter themselves outside them. They mistake adaptation for identity. They believe the role is evidence of essence. And perhaps this is why solitude frightens so many people. Not because silence is empty, but because silence removes the audience.

Eventually, everyone reaches the mirror.

Not the mirror of vanity or self-correction, but the private one—the late-night reflection encountered accidentally while washing your hands or passing a dark window. The moment when expression disappears because nobody is there to receive it.

And for one unbearable second, the question emerges.

When you are alone—truly alone, not performing even for yourself—who is there?

For some people, the question arrives too late. For others, it arrives only once, briefly, before being buried again beneath routine, competence, noise. But occasionally someone pauses long enough to realise that the life they have been inhabiting was partly constructed for survival, partly for admiration, partly from fear.

And that recognition, however frightening, is the beginning of becoming.

Because you cannot take off a mask you do not know you are wearing.

This essay is an excerpt from a longer inquiry I have been living with for some time now.

If it resonated with you, my debut novel — You Are the Journey, coming October 2026 — follows that same thread into deeper territory. Its central question mirrors this work: “Who are you when you stop performing success?” A link for a free pre-order will appear here on Substack soon. Subscribe to stay in touch.

Not the success that was fought for and won, but the kind that settles in slowly—through a series of reasonable decisions, each one logical in the moment—until one morning you wake inside a life you never consciously chose and find, to your quiet alarm, that it fits.

I have a confession to make. I never considered myself stupid. I have a college degree. A startup. A Substack. Followers. I attend therapy. I keep an everyday journal, a gratitude journal, and a motivational journal. My level of intelligence and capacity for reflection is not the problem. But why does my life still feel like borrowed shoes that almost fit?

For years, I mistook the act of reflection for the act of living. I would examine a feeling, document it, discuss it, and then—satisfied by the examination itself—return it to the shelf like a book I had read but not absorbed. It took three encounters across three different centuries for me to understand what I had been doing wrong.

The discomfort of those borrowed shoes was quietly persistent—especially at the most disarming moments, the ones that demanded honesty…

The heat was pressing hard on the day I found myself in Athens. The only relief was shade, and thankfully, there were plenty of tents in the agora—the center of the city, where all citizens came for all manner of things: to buy food, seek news and adventure, gossip about neighbors, meet new people, ask questions, and be consumed by curiosity.

The sight was magnetic. Vibrant and charged with insatiable energy, the place had a way of making you feel both invisible and entirely present. Loud voices, laughter, and scattered curses could be heard in every direction. The smell of fresh melons filled the air and made my mouth water. Under the tent nearest to me, purple figs, ripe peaches, and bursting grapes were piled high. The merchant, draped in a tunic yellowed with age and dotted with stains, cut a melon with one clean, practiced move.

Two men passed by, waving their arms in despair, voices thick with anger. Not long after, an old man followed them—his face covered by his robe, though even from a distance I could see how much sun that face had absorbed over the ages. His intention was clear: to follow the strangers as they moved farther away. For a reason I cannot explain, he stopped. And gave me the most piercing glance I have ever received.

“What are you looking at?” I asked, skeptical.

“You won’t survive here like this,” he said, pointing at me. “You need a robe to cover your face. And better shoes for walking. You can’t stay under this tent forever.”

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“I didn’t mean to,” I said, surprised to hear myself sound apologetic.

My tone shifted something in him. He grew curious and made his way under the tent.

“What do you mean by that?” He came closer.

I could take a better look at him now. Despite his age, his entire being was present. His look was attentive and sharp, his posture straight. His clothes were clean and covered him well enough to stay in full daylight without suffering. The shoes he wore had a thick platform to protect his feet from the heat and dirt. A pocket flask hung from a rope tied around his waist. This place was his element, and he moved through it with the ease of someone at peace.

“I’m about to find water and better clothes for myself,” I said. I lied.

“These are essentials. Why, then, are you standing here, distracted by irrelevant things?”

“I got carried away. Besides, I have plenty of time. I have just arrived, and I want to see what this place has to offer.”

“Do you think you can be present with your thoughts clear if you haven’t arranged even the basic conditions for your being here?”

I had no answer. I only knew that the more I reflected on the various topics spread before me—like the waves of tents across the market—the more I doubted myself, my wisdom, my intelligence. I could endlessly assess options, try them out, and let life offer me trial period after trial period. I could reflect, introspect, and write it all down in my journal. I had been doing this for years, mistaking the map for the territory, the act of looking for the act of seeing.

But the old man caught me off guard. You haven’t made a choice, he said. Not yet. Reflection without choice is not examination—it is its elegant imitation.

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Those were the last words of the man I encountered in the agora. He made me understand that reflection could be a form of avoidance—a sophisticated, well-documented form of avoidance—if it is never followed by choice and action. I could consult my therapist. I could fill another journal. But true examination demands something more: authorship. The willingness to say, “this is mine,” and “this is not.”

The trouble with authorship, I was about to discover, is that it requires knowing who the author actually is. And I had spent enough years wearing other people’s definitions of me that I was no longer certain I could tell.

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The examination path led me to the societal preconceptions entangled in my identity. There were so many of them—layered in my mind without a clear sense of their origin—that the thought of how many decisions I had made based on imposed ideas and a foisted world order was terrifying. It felt like more than I could carry alone. I needed stillness. I needed ground.

Walden Pond offered both. Here, in the tranquil embrace of nature, the piles of dogma and social norms receded like a tide going out. I found, for a moment, an illusional sensation of balance.

The man named Henry David Thoreau lived there, in a tiny, modest cabin surrounded by the dampness and fog of the pond, with enough silence to think and enough solitude to write honestly. No one bothered him. He declared his solitude a deliberate, self-sufficient experiment: proof that one doesn’t need much to live a humble and authentic life. His days moved with purpose. Waking at dawn, he bathed in the pond, worked in the bean field, and spent hours journaling, reading, and walking in nature—attending, above all, to the quiet interior life that the noise of civilization so efficiently drowns.

Stepping closer to the water, I breathed in the sharp, tangy smell of pines. The weather offered little warmth. My hands and feet grew cold. But it was so peaceful. I could hear a distant warbler’s song and the occasional gust of wind shaking the trees. I inhaled again. I didn’t want to go back to the city where the sounds were so loud I couldn’t hear my own thoughts. Here, I didn’t need to navigate the meaningless conversations filled with self-deception and managed performance. Everything seemed so simple.

“Simplicity isn’t the key,” Thoreau said, sitting before the small fireplace.

“Then what is this experiment for?” I asked, taken aback.

“You can’t hide from life in solitude. That is another form of avoidance. It is natural for a human being to desire more, to be inventive and ambitious. But the intention behind your actions is what distinguishes a life from an accumulation of days. You don’t need much to be happy. And yet your contribution to this world could be enormous, even if it goes unrewarded.”

He cleared his throat, watching the crackling logs.

“What can you possibly contribute to nature?” he continued, absorbed in thought. “It nurtures us. Gives us everything that sustains life. The only thing we can offer in return is gratitude and care. It teaches us to be humble and honest with ourselves. Standing in the quietness, you hear your inner voice—the one that cannot lie. You turn to the Earth to find your origin. But once fate calls, you are obliged to respond.”

He looked at me steadily. “You have several lives still to live. And your time is not unlimited.”

I felt lost and tired. Living inside society felt like a constant battle, followed by disappointment and the slow erosion of something essential. I had choices, but each came with consequences and conditions I didn’t want to accept. Sometimes I wanted to give up entirely.

Retreat had so many elegant disguises. Choosing the safer career path. Starting a family because I hadn’t yet found the courage to fully embrace my desire for freedom. Staying in New York because the opportunities were there—even as the noise exhausted me physically and the unnatural pace eroded me from the inside. Each of these looked, from the outside, like a reasonable decision. Each was, from the inside, a small surrender.

And that was the point at which I had begun to accumulate—even while maintaining the proud illusion of resistance.

“The distinction between accumulation and choice is not about lifestyle,” Thoreau said, without waiting for my reply. “It is about the authorship of a self.”

Living deliberately was not the easiest path, but it was the most honest one. I could live in the woods, as Thoreau had—that, too, was a form of deliberate life. But what if I carried these principles back into the city? Waking with a clear intention, but with much higher stakes. Standing my ground by learning how to say no. Keeping the discipline that sustains my health. Not feeding the system by spending my resources on excess and luxury. Keeping my intention clean, and contributing to the world by choosing—each day, deliberately, at cost.

It felt right. But knowing something feels right and having the courage to live accordingly are two entirely different things.

I was not ready to go home yet. There was one more question I was not yet equipped to answer: what do you do when you know you have a choice, choose badly anyway, and then deny it was ever yours?

Paris has a way of making the interior visible. Something about the slow pace of the evenings, the unembarrassed seriousness with which people there treat pleasure and argument alike. Wandering the streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, I roamed aimlessly, humming the melody of Libertango. The soft yellow light of the street lanterns was inviting—nudging me, somehow, to stop hiding and be seen. I passed a place with a small name displayed above the entrance: Café de Flore. The lights were bright, the voices loud. Inside, people were fully, unguardedly alive.

I walked in, eyes eager. The only available seat was at the bar. Next to me, two men were locked in a debate of the kind that requires an audience, whether or not one volunteers. I had nothing to do but listen.

One of them smoked a pipe continuously, inhaling in brief pauses between words. He wore glasses and a tie, and his small physique bore no resemblance to his chaotic, hyperactive energy. He was also the loudest one. The other man was quieter, more methodical—a counterweight to his companion’s restlessness, building arguments the way a mason builds walls, one careful stone at a time.

“Non, monsieur…” the small man began, waving his hands. “The timing is never right.”

“Le donné!” he interrupted his companion’s reply. “Certain things you cannot change, I agree. You cannot choose your birth. But you are always free to choose your death.”

His words struck me still. Was I truly conscious of the fact that I could choose my death—and everything along the way before it? I imagined life as a chessboard: a finite number of moves, each one consequential, none of them neutral. Memories folded in on themselves. The voices around me fell quiet.

I thought of all the moments when I had told myself that circumstances had made the decision for me. The examples I reached for grew increasingly extreme, until I was forced to concede: even under the most terrible conditions, a choice remains. Even a slave can choose between life and death. The nature of the life that remains—that is another conversation entirely. But the choice itself does not disappear simply because it is painful.

We play the roles we believe the world requires from us. I remembered choosing the safest major in college to maximize career opportunities. Everyone told me I was making the right choice. But sitting at the intellectual and literary center of Paris, the weight of that early concession settled on me fully. It is perhaps the worst advice one person can give another: ignore your nature, stay quiet, and bet on the safe option. That is exactly what I did. And while it offered security in the short term, it also came with a hidden price: the spirit dims. The faith in oneself begins to erode quietly, like stone under slow water.

I believed—still believe—in something like predetermined purpose. Not given by God, but arising naturally from the coincidence of one’s characteristics, tendencies, and native gifts. I believed that each of us can contribute most generously by doing what we are most suited for: the craft that always felt like a calling, the one that comes as naturally as breathing. But how can any of us know where we thrive unless we set out on a journey that demands curiosity and, more importantly, the willingness to be wrong?

Through years of being trapped where I didn’t belong, my eyes grew dull. The first symptoms of clinical depression appeared. I was unhappy. And for the first time, I heard myself say the phrase I now recognized as the oldest lie a person can tell: “I didn’t have a choice.”

I was finishing my drink when the man in the glasses turned toward me.

“Excusez-moi, madame,” he said, his speech as quick as his gestures. “We have here an important debate—the question of life and death itself. Can you help us by answering something?”

I nodded, drawn in by his energy.

“Has anyone ever told you that the reason behind their actions was the absence of choice?” He watched my reaction carefully, with the expression of a man who already knows the answer and wants only to see if I will be honest about it.

The atmosphere of the place invited honesty.

“Yes,” I said. “I told this to myself when I stayed in a career for five years past the moment I knew it was wrong. The circumstances. The obligations. But every bit of it felt wrong.”

The quieter companion leaned forward. “But consider,” he said carefully, “that staying inside a constraint—even one you have built yourself—can feel indistinguishable from having no option at all. The walls become invisible precisely because you stopped testing them.”

“Mon cher,” the small man cut in, looking at me with something between impatience and recognition. “Exactly. The problem was not that you stayed. The problem was that you called it fate. You made yourself into a victim of your own decision—and that, madame, is the most comfortable lie a person can tell. It requires no villain. It requires no courage. It asks nothing of you at all.”

I sat with that for a moment.

He was right, and I knew it in the specific, uncomfortable way you know something you have been successfully avoiding. I had not lacked options. I had lacked the willingness to own the cost of choosing differently—to say, plainly and without footnotes, I am staying because I am afraid, and that is my choice. Instead, I had constructed an elaborate architecture of circumstance and called it reality. I had been the author of my own captivity, signing each page anonymously.

The man in the glasses adjusted his frames and lowered his voice, as if sharing something that could get a person into trouble.

“We all have a choice. We simply do not want to test our luck. Pretending otherwise is the lie—and it is a lie we tell not to others, but to ourselves.”

It was more radical than comfortable. But I agreed with him. That night at Café de Flore, after encountering Jean-Paul Sartre and his concept of bad faith, I understood at last what Socrates in the agora had been pointing toward, and what Thoreau had been practicing alone by the water: that authorship of a life is not a single act of courage. It is a daily practice of honesty about what you are choosing—and why.

The moment of coming home was unlike any I had known. Everything seemed artificial—like a construction assembled from unsuitable materials by someone who had been working from the wrong blueprint. I began noticing the power of will wherever I went. Some people had it in abundance: they knew their strength, they knew themselves, and they acted promptly and boldly, with the particular confidence of those who have agreed to be responsible for their own lives. Others used philosophical and psychological language to defend their blindness—reflecting, avoiding, hiding from themselves, or blaming others. Sometimes they blamed fate, insisting they had had no choice, and the insistence had a familiar sound.

I recognized it because I had spoken it myself.

How many people had I passed along the way with that same dull look in their eyes—people who were unhappy at work, in their relationships, in the city they’d been born in and stayed in for some reason. People who played versions of themselves that each room seemed to require, forgetting who they had been before. The borrowed shoes had become their feet.

My journey has taught me that examination is not a destination. It is an ongoing process—more a form of mental and existential hygiene than a philosophical achievement. It does not end in a breakthrough. It continues every morning, in the small, unremarkable decisions that either inch you toward yourself or quietly away from it.

And so I keep returning to this question:

When did I last make a decision that was genuinely mine—not reasonable, not expected, not explained by circumstance, but chosen deliberately, at cost, with my name on it?

I don’t always have a good answer. But I have stopped pretending that the absence of one is the same as the absence of a choice.

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FOUR CENTURIES EARLIER

In the winter of 1619, René Descartes sat alone in a small heated room—a poêle, as the French called it—sheltering from a German frost in Bavaria and arrived at the same suspicion. He was twenty-three. Outside, the Thirty Years' War was moving across Europe like a storm. Inside, he made a decision: to doubt everything he had ever been told was true. Not as an act of despair. As an act of method.

I did not know, on my rainy afternoon, that what I was beginning had a name. I only knew that something had shifted—that the life I had been living had quietly become a house I moved into without checking whose furniture was already there.

I decided to clean the closet. The internal one—the place where we store everything accumulated about ourselves without quite knowing when it arrived or who left it there. I began examining each item one by one. This belief: did I grow it, or was it handed to me? This fear: is it mine, or did I inherit it the way you inherit an old coat from someone who no longer wants it and keep it not because it fits, but because throwing it out felt rude?

THE METHOD

Descartes called his process radical doubt. He would accept nothing that could be questioned. He doubted his senses—they had deceived him before. He doubted the external world—perhaps it was all a dream. He doubted the books he had studied, the teachers who had formed him, the entire inherited architecture of his understanding. He stripped it all back, item by item, until he found what could not be stripped further.

Three categories emerged from my own inventory. Things that had always been there, stitched into something I could only call essential. Things I was told quietly and repeatedly until I mistook instruction for identity. And things not yet uncovered: the inheritances still waiting in the dark at the back, the ones that had shaped the largest decisions of my life without ever announcing themselves.

The most consequential things in a life are rarely the ones we examine. They are the ones we never thought to question.

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My grandfather was rarely home when I was little. He was the central figure of the household by virtue of absence—always traveling, always on the other side of a phone call or a closed door. When he returned, he brought queer, beautiful things: objects I had no names for, gifts from corners of the world I hadn't yet imagined. And books. He had an uncanny gift for choosing exactly the ones that would crack something open in me—not the ones I asked for, not the ones any child would think to want, but the ones that somehow already knew what I needed.

I grew up reaching for what he left behind more than for him. The books answered back in ways he didn't. And somewhere in that gap—in the specific texture of his absence, in the strange objects and the carefully chosen pages—a girl decided that literature was the place where life made sense.

WHAT REMAINS

What Descartes found at the bottom of his doubt was not nothing. It was the one thing the abyss could not swallow: the fact that something was doing the doubting. Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. After everything inherited had been stripped away, what remained was the self that was doing the stripping. That was the only ground he could trust.

How could my grandfather have known? How could anyone predict that giving a child less of yourself would give her, in compensation, the entire interior world of human thought? It looks like a chance. It was not a chance. It was inheritance—the kind that moves underground, shaping the largest decisions of a life before you think to question it.

This is what the closet taught me. Not that I was empty underneath the inherited things. But that something had survived all of it—had, in fact, been formed by navigating through it. The self that remained after the examination was not a self without history. It was a self that had finally looked its history in the face.

Examining the life you are living is not a luxury. It is the necessary inflection point—the moment you move from existing inside an inherited story to beginning to author one of your own. The existential crisis is not a malfunction. It is the system working exactly as it was designed: disorienting you precisely so that you might reorient toward something true.

THE STOVE ROOM

Descartes did not stay in the stove room forever. He emerged from it with something he had not had when he entered: a foundation he had tested himself, ground he had chosen rather than simply inherited. The doubt was not the destination. It was the door.

The abyss is not something to fear. It is the room where you meet yourself—possibly for the first time. Dark, yes. Vertiginous, certainly. But if you can stand at its edge long enough to ask the question—what, of all of this, is actually mine?—something shifts that does not shift back.

This journey is finite. Somewhere inside all that inheritance—underneath the borrowed fears and the old coats and the books chosen by a man who was always traveling—there is something that was only ever yours. Most people never go looking.

You are lucky if the abyss finds you. Luckier still if you learn to stand at its edge without looking away.

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There is a voice that keeps persuading me to keep up with the pace, with the direction, with progress itself. Over time, that voice has become a part of me. And yet, more and more often, it feels like it contradicts something quieter, something more essential.

The depth of the sky when you lie beneath a tree.
The sound of birds layered over your own thoughts.
A line or two written on a slow afternoon in a café—without the need to turn it into anything.

I was born into a world that seemed to have space for all of this.

And yet, some mornings, it feels as though I’ve woken up somewhere else entirely—something colder, more compressed. A place where time is scarce, and being human feels almost inefficient.

Studying philosophy led me to a simple realization: we move in circles. What feels like discovery today has already been thought, written, and lived by someone centuries before us.

The difference now is not access to wisdom—we have more of it than ever.
The difference is in which ideas we choose to carry forward.

One of them is Stoicism.

This essay is not about rejecting Stoicism, but about questioning the way it is used today—why it has become so popular, and whether something essential is being lost in the process.

In its original form, it was never about suppressing emotion but about not being ruled by it.

At its core, Stoicism offers something extraordinary: the idea that you can remain free within any external circumstance. That you can choose your response, rather than be carried away by fear, impulse, or chaos.

If it rains, take an umbrella.

There is a quiet dignity in that.

Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations as private reflections, which were never intended to be read. In many ways, they are the notes of a man trying to become the person he believed he should be.

But what happens when this philosophy is lifted out of its context and placed into a world that already rewards control, suppression, and efficiency?

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Today, we live in a reality shaped by rapid technological progress—artificial intelligence, surveillance systems, tools that operate faster than thought itself.

Efficiency is no longer a virtue. It is a requirement.

And in such a world, Stoicism can begin to shift, not as a path to inner freedom but as a justification for emotional distance.

We become calmer, more composed, more productive.

But are we becoming more human?

Or simply more efficient?

It is easy to say that we are less cruel than previous centuries.
But it is far less clear whether we are more humane.

We are building systems that remember everything, respond instantly, and operate without hesitation or doubt. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, we begin to admire those qualities and expect them from ourselves.

And yet, the beauty of being human has never been in perfection.
It has always been in difference.

In the scientist who devotes a life to understanding.
In the teacher who cares.
In the poet who notices what others overlook.

The tragedy is not that we lack intelligence but that we struggle to share it with empathy.

Perhaps what we need is not more control, but a different orientation toward being human.

A philosophy that reminds us not only how to endure but how to feel.

To value quiet hours.
To listen without rushing.
To offer warmth without calculation.

To recognize that not everything meaningful can be optimized.

Stoicism, in its essence, was never meant to erase emotion but to guide it. It can still serve that role if we allow it to return to something simpler: discipline without suppression.

Because the awakening to one’s true self requires time.
And courage.
And the willingness to move against the current.

Sometimes it feels as though the chances of preserving our humanity within today’s value system are growing smaller.

And yet—

I believe that awakening is already happening.
Quietly.
Even now.

Perhaps that is why this question keeps returning in my fiction as well. One of the characters in You Are The Journey arrives at a similar realization after achieving yet another long-desired goal: that if we continue sacrificing the human part of ourselves to survive the world we have built, there may be nothing left in us worth saving.

Sophie wandered through the gallery halls, absorbed in her own mind. Rainwater slid in slow, uneven drops from the hem of her felt coat. There was nowhere to rush to. The rain would not stop anytime soon.

Time enough to be alone with herself.

She knew this gallery better than her own home. Homes changed—one apartment after another—while the gallery remained, quietly unmoving. She had once interned here.

An MA in Art History.
Or another way to remain unemployed in the modern world.

She turned into a smaller, more secluded room, avoiding familiar faces. Sitting down on the floor, she placed her bag beside her without a sound. She took off her coat, shook the rain from her hair, and drew her knees close.

Across from her, suspended in shadow and light, hung Narcissus by Caravaggio.

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On most days, she would have spoken about technique — about mastery, composition, the violence of contrast. But today, there was no one to speak to.

So she simply watched.

Watched the reflection tremble in the stillness of the painted water.

Would Narcissus have understood, if he had lived long enough, that infatuation is often nothing more than projection?

The thought unsettled her.

How often had she mistaken infatuation for love—simply because she had poured her own desires, her imagined future, her unspoken needs into another person, unwilling to let the illusion end?

Infatuation begins the moment we recognize ourselves in another person.

“But most of us don’t have the luxury,” she murmured with a faint, ironic smile, “of staring at a flawless reflection day and night, the way you did.”

Because the reflection never stays.

It shifts. It fractures. It gives way to someone else — someone with their own desires, their own fears, their own understanding of the world. And before long, they begin projecting back.

Sophie leaned against the wall, settling deeper into stillness.

No wonder people have begun to give up on love.

Instead of something simple, it becomes a tangled knot: expectations, demands, misunderstandings, quiet disappointments. Where, exactly, is love in all of this?

She exhaled slowly.

Love begins the moment we realize they are not us.

And if that is true, then perhaps love can only be tested in one way. Would you still choose them — once you see them as they are?

Without the comfort of being reflected back.
Without the promise that your needs will be met.
Without conditions.

Simply because the feeling exists.

Her answer came instantly.

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Yes.

Of course, yes.

How she wished she could see him once more — lying in bed, reading printed manuscripts so his eyes wouldn’t tire from the glow of a screen. He always worked for at least an hour before falling asleep, marking the pages with a pencil.

There had been something deeply intimate in that image for her. She wanted to see it again…

Without giving up her freedom in exchange.

Was the price too high… to reshape your life simply because you had managed to feel something real?

For some, perhaps not. There are many who willingly step into shared lives, into structures that promise stability, even if they come with quiet constraints.

But for Sophie, it was never that simple.

How do you commit to something you already sense may not hold?

She had never believed that love should demand the shrinking of a life.

To love someone, she thought, is not to merge into them but to recognize a life that exists beyond you, and to respect it.

Perhaps partnership is not about becoming one, but about growing, side by side, without taking that freedom away from each other.

She did not have a universal answer.

But she knew this much: two people who love each other have the right to decide how to live. How much of life is shared, and how much remains their own. How much freedom each of them needs to remain fully themselves.

And if you still love a person after all the ways life changes them—

perhaps that is love.

She looked at the painting one last time before standing.

“Thank you, master,” she said quietly.
“You’re right, as always.”

She paused.

“We meet another person only as deeply as we have met ourselves.”

How I wish I could send you this letter. Written by hand on the sheet of paper I happened to have with me on the flight back to New York—the flight I boarded with hesitation. Perhaps it would explain something between us. Perhaps it would only complicate things further.

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During the short time we were able to share, I tried to be careful with your feelings. I saw the pain you carried long before you ever spoke about it. It isn’t for me to judge whether you have become a prisoner of that pain, carefully hiding it from the world.

But the truth is that I never placed the weight of my own emotions and doubts on your shoulders.

I love you, Sophie.

The feeling settled in me the day we met. Not slowly, not reluctantly. Simply and quietly, as if it had been waiting for the right moment to appear.

You made me understand something about love that I had never fully grasped before. Love arrives almost like a blessing, in its most innocent form. We do not choose it. It does not consult our plans or our reason. It has very little to do with projections, illusions, or the practical idea of building a life with someone. It certainly has nothing to do with possession.

In that sense, love is both beautiful and tragic.

Beautiful because it exists beyond our ego. Tragic because we are not always wise enough to understand it—or strong enough to carry it through our lives.

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I know that I will always love you.

And perhaps it would be easier if I didn’t. Because I also know that the feeling is not the same for you. You would probably deny this if you were here, but I know it to be true.

I am something different to you.

I wish I could tell you that loss makes life clearer. That tragedy rearranges the world into something that finally makes sense. But it doesn’t.

The day my mother and my little brother died in that accident, everything collapsed into silence. For a long time afterward, life felt simple—not because I understood it, but because everything had become black and white.

When grief is that loud, there is no room for confusion.

But slowly the colors returned. And with them came complexity again. The tragedies we endure don’t make us wiser in the way people like to imagine. They make us more layered. Sometimes more fragile. Sometimes more difficult even to ourselves.

You never knew your father. Losing him again will not make you a righteous victim in the eyes of the world. Perhaps only in your own.

There will be questions that follow you for years.

No, life will not suddenly become clearer.

But I know you will find your way through it.

You are extraordinarily intelligent and talented, my dearest girl. The way your mind moves is the most beautiful work I have ever had the privilege to read.

There is only one thing you should never worry about.

Take as much time as you need.

I will still be here.

Yours,
N