Human Behavior

Individuals, habits, emotions, cognition, decision-making.

Elephant conservation in Zimbabwe

The animals we save and the ones we eat

October 25, 2026 — Leave a comment

On the women guarding Zimbabwe’s elephants.

In 2017, sixteen women walked into the Zimbabwean bush to stop poachers.

Some had survived domestic violence.

Some had survived sexual assault.

Some were raising children alone, with almost nothing.

Nobody had ever trusted them with anything worth protecting.

Now they were protecting elephants.

They became Akashinga. In Shona, the brave ones.

National Geographic followed them as they trained, patrolled and confronted the people killing wildlife for profit.

Akashinga was founded by Damien Mander, a former Australian special forces soldier. He recruited women from poor rural communities and gave them training, a salary and a role in protecting the land they grew up on.

That last part matters.

Conservation loves a story in which wildlife only became valuable once outsiders arrived to protect it.

Zimbabwe never needed that lesson.

Shona communities lived by totems, ancestral beliefs and customary rules that governed which animals could be hunted and which resources could be taken. Nature wasn’t a wilderness behind a fence. It was law, family and memory.

What changed wasn’t how much people valued wildlife.

It was who got to decide what happened to it.

Akashinga puts local women on the front line. For decades, conservation treated the communities living beside parks as the problem to keep out.

Now those communities are the ones keeping watch.

The program also breaks the idea that conservation is something wealthy Westerners do on vacation.

And there’s one more detail that’s easy to skim past.

The rangers eat a plant-based diet.

They patrol the bush and face down poachers on it.

Mander himself is vegan.

So much for plant-based food being a soft, urban luxury for people with yoga mats and oat milk.

That detail brings me to the question I can’t put down.

We fly across continents to see elephants.

We donate to save them.

We mourn when they’re killed.

Then we grill a pig and call it Sunday.

Why?

Not because we’ve weighed what each animal does for the planet.

We protect the animals that move us. Researchers who tracked thousands of zoo donors found people backed the species they found charismatic, not the ones closest to extinction.

Even people who share their land with elephants think this way. In northeast India, tea-estate communities support elephant conservation out of cultural reverence and a belief in the animal’s right to exist, not for anything it does for the ecosystem.

And we eat the animals we were raised to eat. When people defend meat, nearly every justification falls into four buckets: natural, normal, necessary and nice.

Tradition and taste, dressed up as reasons.

None of them has anything to say about a pig’s suffering.

We inherit categories. Companion. Food. Sacred. Pest. Every culture draws those lines differently, and every culture believes its own lines are obvious.

Then the food system finishes the job. By the time a pig reaches the supermarket shelf, there’s no pig left. Just a product, packaged so nobody has to wonder where it came from.

Familiarity isn’t an argument.

And the contradiction isn’t only moral.

Livestock and the crops grown to feed them swallow enormous amounts of land. Cattle ranching is the biggest driver of deforestation in the Amazon. Globally, livestock produce a sixth of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions.

So we pay rangers to defend wildlife while our plates finance the destruction of the places wildlife lives.

Yes, subsidies, trade rules and corporations shape the system far more than any single shopper.

That’s a reason to demand better policy.

It’s not an excuse to eat as if nothing is connected.

I wrote recently that conservation is usually the bill we pay after treating the natural world like a warehouse.

This is the same bill.

We just pay it at dinner.

I can’t think about any of this without thinking about Islam.

It gives me three words for our place in creation.

Khalifah, or stewardship.

Amanah, or trust.

Mizan, or balance.

None of them mean ownership. Power over other creatures isn’t a license. It’s a debt.

The Quran permits eating certain animals. It doesn’t command veganism, and I won’t pretend it does.

But permission isn’t obligation.

Halal tells us what we’re allowed to eat.

Tayyib asks whether it’s good. Pure. Wholesome.

Was the animal raised, killed and brought to our table in a way we could defend?

Most of us stop at the first question.

I can’t stop at the second.

If I’m a steward, that animal’s safety was entrusted to me.

So the real question isn’t whether I’m allowed to eat it.

It’s whether I should cowardly pay someone else to kill an innocent, sentient being I’m meant to protect, when my plate has countless options that don’t require a death.

For me, the answer is obviously no.

That’s where faith stops being a rulebook and becomes a conscience.

The women of Akashinga know what it means to live at the mercy of someone stronger.

Today, they stand between the strong and the defenseless.

They protect elephants from people who look at a living animal and see only what it’s worth to them.

That’s the habit they fight every day.

I find the same habit on my plate.

Teekay

Little rat

The rat doesn’t know it’s trespassing

October 19, 2026 — Leave a comment

An animal’s right to live shouldn’t depend on its cuteness.

Every year, rats in Paris are estimated to consume around 850 metric tons of waste. That’s roughly 2.3 metric tons a day. Think about that for a second. Without rats eating that waste, we’d have even more garbage to collect from our streets, more work for sanitation workers and more waste ending up in landfills.

We throw food away, rats eat some of it, and then we poison them for being there.

In cities around the world, rats are killed with poison or caught on glue boards, where they struggle for hours before dying of exhaustion, dehydration or injury. If we inflicted the same suffering on a cat or a dog, we’d call it cruelty. When the victim is a rat, we call it “pest control”.

Why should the species determine whether a death is acceptable?

For centuries, rats have been cast as villains in the story of the plague. The connection between rodents, fleas and plague is real, but the history is more complicated than the familiar account suggests. A 2018 study published in PNAS found that human fleas and body lice could explain the spread of several major European plague epidemics better than rat fleas could. The findings challenge the story we’ve told about them for generations.

Rats are also far more complex than their reputation suggests. They groom themselves, play, learn and form social relationships. In a 2011 experiment published in Science, researchers found that rats learned to release trapped companions, sometimes freeing them before accessing chocolate and later sharing it. The researchers interpreted their findings as evidence of prosocial behavior consistent with empathy-like motivation.

We can’t know whether rats experience empathy exactly as we do. But imagine if they had soft faces, expressive eyes and a reputation for loyalty. Would we describe their behavior differently? We celebrate a dog comforting another dog. A rat helping a companion rarely enters our collective imagination.

That said, a rat shouldn’t have to prove its intelligence, demonstrate affection or resemble us to earn the right to live.

The same problem appears whenever wildlife conflicts with human interests. A wild boar destroys a field. A fox takes poultry. A deer eats young shoots. The damage can be real, and farmers have every right to protect their livelihoods. But we rarely ask how much of the conflict stems from the way we’ve transformed the land around us.

We clear forests, fragment habitats, build roads and expand farms. Wildlife loses places to live and sources of food. When animals enter our fields and settlements to survive, we treat their presence as an offense. We claim the land, draw the boundaries and expect other species to adapt. When they do, we punish them for it.

I’m not saying people shouldn’t have to accept every loss or leave their homes and crops unprotected. What I’m saying is that we can secure food and waste, use non-lethal deterrents and find ways to coexist without killing the animals whose presence inconveniences us. Too often, killing is treated as the obvious answer before other approaches have been seriously considered.

A glue board doesn’t become humane because the animal caught on it is a rat. Poison doesn’t become less cruel because its victim is a fox. A deer doesn’t become incapable of suffering because someone has decided there are too many of them (there aren’t). Words like culling, population management and pest control may describe what we’re doing, but they don’t change what happens to the animal.

I don’t believe an animal should have to die because it damages our property, threatens our crops or costs us money. Protecting a livelihood is not the same as defending a life. If an animal poses an immediate threat to our safety, self-defense is another matter. But a damaged field, a raided bin or a fox in a chicken coop isn’t an attack on us.

We shouldn’t confuse the loss of something we own with a threat to our lives, then make another living being pay for the difference.

We’ve built a world in which our needs are treated as facts and other animals’ needs as problems. A rat looks for food, a fox seeks shelter and a boar wanders into a field. We see damage, infestation and a population to control. The animals are trying to survive in a world we’ve reshaped around ourselves.

The question isn’t whether rats are lovable. It’s whether an animal’s right to live should depend on how well it fits into the world we’ve claimed for ourselves.

We keep asking what these animals cost us. Perhaps it’s time to ask what we’re willing to make them pay.

Thanks for reading.

Teekay

Neurons

The Age of Intention

August 23, 2026 — Leave a comment

Why the next technological revolution isn’t about better gadgets but about making them disappear.

For most of human history, technology has demanded our attention.

Every major communication technology has given us access to more information, more entertainment, and more convenience. At the same time, every one of them has become a new way for businesses to reach us.

That’s the pattern.

Newspapers didn’t simply inform us. They created mass advertising.

Radio made information immediate. It also gave brands a voice inside our homes.

Television added images, making entertainment more immersive and advertising more persuasive than ever before.

Then came the internet.

Information became interactive. We no longer consumed content aimlessly. We searched for it. We compared products. We booked vacations. We bought books without stepping outside.

The internet didn’t just connect people.

It connected consumers to businesses with almost no friction.

Then smartphones arrived.

Suddenly, the internet wasn’t somewhere we went.

It was everywhere.

At first, this felt like the final step. We had the world’s knowledge in our pockets. We could order dinner, book a flight, answer an email, and watch a movie from almost anywhere.

But after nearly two decades, something feels different.

The smartphone has become indispensable. It’s also becoming the bottleneck.

The friction we stopped noticing

Think about what happens every time you want to do something online.

You stop walking. You reach into your pocket. You unlock your phone. You find the right app. You type. You scroll. You compare. You scroll some more. You make your choice.

We do this hundreds of times every week without thinking about it. It’s become second nature.

But habit isn’t proof that something is final. People once felt exactly the same way about the desktop computer, right before the smartphone replaced it.

Every technological revolution has reduced friction.

We no longer wait for tomorrow’s newspaper. We don’t sit at a desktop computer to check our emails anymore. We don’t need a map folded inside the glove compartment.

People once marveled at electricity. Crowds gathered just to watch a light bulb turn on. Now we flip a switch without a single thought.

The internet is becoming the same kind of invisible, but the smartphone isn’t.

Artificial intelligence may become part of the solution.

The first technology that understands us

For decades, humans learned how to communicate with computers.

We memorized commands. We clicked buttons. We learned menus. We adapted ourselves to software.

Artificial intelligence reverses that relationship.

For the first time, computers are beginning to adapt to us.

They understand natural language, recognize context and remember previous conversations.

Instead of learning how to use a machine, we simply express what we want.

That’s a much bigger shift than most people realize.

But the real revolution isn’t AI itself.

It’s the interface AI makes possible.

From navigation to intention

For thirty years, the internet has been built around navigation.

We navigate websites, menus, search results and endless feeds.

Even shopping follows the same logic.

Imagine you need hiking shoes today.

You open Google. Type your query. Visit several websites. Read reviews. Compare prices. Filter by size. Filter by color. Maybe watch a YouTube review.

Eventually, you make a decision.

Now imagine asking this instead:

“Find me a pair of hiking shoes under 150 dollars”

You don’t even have to explain the rest. It already knows you hike in wet forests. It already knows you’d rather carry extra weight than replace a pair every season. You stopped over explaining the same way you stopped explaining directions to someone who already knows the way.

The AI searches thousands of products. It reads expert reviews, compares prices, checks availability, filters poor-quality options and most importantly understands your priorities because it already knows how you travel.

Then it shows you five choices. Not five hundred.

That’s the difference.

You don’t search anymore. You choose from a selection designed specifically for you.

That may sound subtle but it’s not. It’s a complete redesign of the internet.

Humans stop navigating information altogether.

AI becomes the navigator. Humans simply express intentions.

The smartphone after the smartphone

If conversation becomes our primary interface, what happens to the smartphone then?

I don’t think it disappears overnight. But I do think it becomes less central.

Today, almost every interaction begins by reaching for a screen. Tomorrow, many of those interactions won’t require one at all.

“Translate what they’re saying.”

“Book me the cheapest train tomorrow morning.”

“Reply that I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

“Summarize today’s news.”

None of these tasks need a display. They only need understanding, which raises a fascinating question: If we no longer need to hold a phone, what replaces it?

Voice alone won’t be enough. Humans are visual. If I’m buying a camera, I want to compare designs. If I’m choosing clothes, I want to see colors. If I’m watching a film, reading a map, or editing a photograph, I need images.

Conversation can replace search. It can’t replace vision. So whatever replaces the phone still needs a screen somewhere. It just won’t be one we hold.

My bet is glasses first. Not because they’re the most exciting option, but because they’re the least disruptive one. People have worn glasses for centuries. A display sitting in your field of vision while your hands stay free isn’t a hard sell. Navigation becomes effortless. Notifications appear naturally. Visual information follows your gaze instead of forcing you to look down.

Right behind them is a wearable version of the same idea, something clipped to a jacket or worn on our chest, invisible most of the time and only projecting a fuller hologram when there’s actually something worth seeing in detail. Earbuds handle the conversation. The projection handles anything that needs real screen space.

There’s a lighter version of that same idea too. An earpiece to speak into and listen, paired with a watch that flashes up a quick glance-sized visual, not a full display, just enough to confirm a choice or check a map pin. You already glance at your wrist without thinking about it, so it wouldn’t even feel like a new habit.

If all three of those stall, the dark horse is something closer to the eye itself, a lens or a retinal projection that skips the hardware entirely. I’d bet against it happening first, but not against it happening eventually.

Whichever one wins, the final device won’t be the most impressive one. It’ll be the one people forget they’re wearing.

The problem nobody has solved

That’s one reason I didn’t list earbuds alone as the next smartphone. In reality, they already handle a lot, just not on their own, since they still need to be tethered to another device to do it, and they can’t show you anything.

The engineering challenges are obvious. Batteries remain small. Independent internet connectivity requires more components. Processing advanced AI locally demands more power than today’s earphones can provide.

Technology will improve. It always does.

Whichever device ends up carrying the projector, the future almost certainly combines conversation with vision. Not one or the other. Both.

The next internet

Whenever we imagine the future, we usually stop at the next gadget. A better phone, better glasses, a smaller computer.

That’s not nothing, but it’s not the real shift either.

The real transformation isn’t the device. It’s the relationship.

For thirty years we’ve interacted with technology by learning its language. Menus. Buttons. Search bars. Apps.

Artificial intelligence reverses that. Technology is finally learning ours.

Once that happens, everything built around search, clicks, scrolling, and screens begins to change. Not overnight. But permanently.

Glasses, a wrist projector, or something else entirely, whichever device ends up carrying that shift matters less than the shift itself.

The future belongs to intention.

One day we’ll look back at pulling a phone from our pocket dozens of times a day the same way we look back at waiting for tomorrow’s newspaper. Not with nostalgia. With disbelief that it ever felt normal.

Teekay

man in the mirror

What Happens When You Stop Looking at Yourself

August 21, 2026 — Leave a comment

A trap or a starting point?

My wife and I spent a few months traveling Europe in our van in 2024. We had one mirror on board, small and retractable, and it barely got used. I’d flip it down to shave or put in my contacts, maybe twice a month. My wife used it even less.

I rarely thought about my appearance during that time. Between writing, working, hiking, upgrading the van and taking photos, my attention was usually somewhere else.

I’d think about a sentence I couldn’t get right, or the light on a trail I wanted to capture before it disappeared. I’d think about a client’s project or a strange noise coming from the engine. Some mornings, I woke up and had no idea what I looked like, and it didn’t cross my mind to check.

That’s what happens when you stop looking at yourself. Your attention doesn’t disappear. It just goes somewhere else.

The striking part is when we went back into a regular house.

Whenever we stayed with family or traveled without the van, we were suddenly surrounded by mirrors again. In the bathroom, the bedroom, the elevator, hotel lobbies and shopping malls. Within hours, I noticed myself looking into them without even realizing it.

Nothing about me had changed.

Only my environment had.

Every time that happened, I thought of something Fernando Pessoa once wrote.

“Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face. There’s nothing more sinister. The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.”

The first time I read those words, they sounded ridiculous.

Now I’m not so sure.

Michael Jackson had a different read on the same object. “Man in the Mirror” was reportedly his favorite of his own songs, and its argument is the opposite of Pessoa’s. Look at your reflection not to admire it, but to change what needs changing. The man in the mirror isn’t just an image. He’s the one you’re accountable to.

Both men were talking about the same glass. One saw a trap. The other saw a starting point.

Vanity didn’t begin with the mirror. Humans have always cared about beauty and compared themselves to one another.

But the mirror changed our relationship with ourselves.

Before mirrors became common, the closest thing people had to a reflection was still water. Lakes, ponds and quiet rivers occasionally revealed a face looking back. The experience was fleeting. A ripple or a gust of wind was enough to erase it.

Even today, that’s usually how I see myself while hiking. Sometimes my reflection appears in a calm lake or a stream. I notice it for a second, then keep walking.

Water reflects.

It doesn’t invite inspection.

The mirror does.

For the first time, people could study themselves whenever they wanted. Every wrinkle, every expression and every imperfection became something to examine. Our face slowly stopped being something other people recognized and became something we managed.

Then the mirror evolved.

Today, it fits inside our pockets.

Every smartphone is a portable mirror. Every front-facing camera gives us another opportunity to check ourselves. Social media takes it one step further. It doesn’t simply encourage us to look at ourselves. It encourages us to compare ourselves.

The question quietly changes.

Not what am I doing?

But how do I look doing it?

Experiences become performances.

A meal becomes a photograph before it becomes lunch.

A mountain becomes a backdrop before it becomes a destination.

A sunset becomes content before it becomes a memory.

The image slowly replaces the experience.

The myth of Narcissus wasn’t really about self-love. It was about confusing reality with its reflection.

Perhaps we’ve built an entire culture around that confusion.

Capitalism couldn’t have asked for a better invention than the smartphone. A device that constantly reminds people they are incomplete is also a device that constantly sells solutions.

You don’t like your skin? Buy this.

Your clothes? Replace them.

Your face? Filter it.

Your life? Compare it to someone else’s until it feels inadequate.

The reflection no longer shows who we are. It tells us who we should become. We look to it for answers, but all it gives us back is a question.

I don’t think mirrors are the enemy. They help us shave, treat a cut or make sure there’s nothing in our teeth. Like every tool, they have a purpose.

The problem begins when they stop serving us and begin shaping us.

Living in the van hadn’t made me immune to vanity. It had simply removed thousands of small reminders to think about myself.

Returning to a conventional home reminds me how unusual that has become.

Modern life is designed to redirect our attention back toward ourselves. Not just through mirrors, but through advertisements, cameras, screens and algorithms that constantly ask the same question:

How do you look?

Far fewer things ask a more important one.

What are you paying attention to?

Maybe that’s why nature feels so restorative.

The forest doesn’t care what I’m wearing.

The mountains aren’t impressed by beauty.

A lake reflects my face for a moment before the wind carries it away.

Nature never asks me to perform.

It simply asks me to be present.

That’s the gift a mirror can’t give.

Pessoa was probably exaggerating.

The inventor of the mirror didn’t poison the human heart.

But he may have started a process that eventually led us here.

A civilization that spends more time looking at itself than at the world eventually mistakes appearance for reality.

Teekay

Respect others

What Happened to Good Manners?

August 17, 2026 — Leave a comment

On consideration, public space and the small things we do to make life easier for one another

I’ve always been annoyed by bad manners because I was raised to understand that other people exist.

You wait your turn. You let people off the train before getting on. You say please and thank you. You cover your mouth when you cough. You don’t make an entire bus listen to your phone conversation.

None of this is complicated.

And yet, every time I use public transportation, walk through a crowded city or deal with a stranger, I find myself wondering what happened to basic manners.

I’m not talking about old-fashioned etiquette. I couldn’t care less which fork you use at dinner or whether you know which glass is supposed to hold which wine.

I’m talking about something much simpler.

Consideration.

You don’t have to like people. You simply have to remember that they exist.

Public space isn’t your living room

Few things irritate me more than people standing directly in front of the doors of a subway, tram or train while everyone inside is trying to get off.

The doors open. People are trying to leave. And there they are, standing directly in the way, already preparing to get on.

Why?

Just wait, let people get off, then get on.

The same applies to queues.

There’s a reason we queue. Everyone waits their turn and eventually gets served. Cutting the line is essentially saying that your time matters more than everyone who arrived before you. It’s disrespectful!

Then there are the people who seem to believe public transportation is an extension of their living room.

Videos playing loudly. Music without headphones. Loud phone conversations. Shouting across the carriage. Bags occupying seats while people are standing.

A crowded bus or train is a shared space. Nobody else should be forced to participate in your private life simply because you happen to be sitting next to them.

The same goes for assigned seats. If your ticket says 14A, that’s your seat. It shouldn’t be controversial.

These things sound trivial, but that’s precisely the point. Living among other people requires thousands of tiny acts of awareness that take almost no effort.

Some things should stay private

Then there’s basic hygiene.

Cover your mouth when you cough or sneeze. Cover it when you yawn.

If you’re sick, blow your nose rather than sitting beside strangers on a crowded bus and sniffing continuously for an hour. Also, wear a mask, it costs nothing and protects those around you.

And please, for the love of everything, don’t spend your commute picking your nose, scratching yourself or inspecting parts of your body that don’t need to become public entertainment.

There are things may be normal for some to do in private, but they don’t need to be performed in front of strangers.

Good manners are about understanding where you are and how your behavior affects the people around you.

Food is another example.

You might love the smell of whatever you’re eating. The person sitting beside you might want to vomit.

Not everyone likes the smell of fish, heavily spiced food or whatever else you’ve brought into a sealed bus or train. In an open-air setting, eat whatever you want. In a packed carriage, perhaps consider that everyone else has to smell it too.

And then there are smokers.

Someone goes outside, smokes a cigarette and gets back onto a crowded bus as though the smell disappeared when the cigarette did.

It didn’t.

It’s still in their clothes, their hair, their hands and their breath. Sit beside someone who has just smoked in a confined space and you know exactly what I’m talking about. They stink.

People often don’t realize how much they smell because they’re accustomed to their own smell.

The rest of us aren’t.

Please and thank you

Perhaps what bothers me most is how little effort some people seem willing to put into ordinary human interactions.

Someone holds a door open for you.

Say thank you.

Someone gives you directions.

Say thank you.

Someone does something for you that they didn’t have to do.

Say thank you.

And hold the door for the person behind you while you’re at it. You don’t need to make a performance of it. Just don’t let it slam into their face when they’re two steps behind you.

These words and gestures cost almost nothing.

The same applies to asking for help.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve asked a public employee a perfectly reasonable question and received an immediate “no”, without any attempt to find an answer or suggest an alternative.

Sometimes the answer isn’t actually no. They simply can’t be bothered.

I’ve experienced the same thing when asking whether something is vegan in restaurants and dessert shops. Someone will immediately tell me there is nothing vegan, only for me to look at the menu and discover several things that happen to be vegan.

That’s not necessarily hostility. Sometimes it’s just laziness.

If you don’t know, say you don’t know.

If you can find out, find out.

If something genuinely isn’t possible, explain it.

You don’t need to solve everyone’s problems. But if your job is to help people, making the smallest reasonable effort shouldn’t be considered extraordinary.

We have to teach this

This is where I think parents have an enormous responsibility.

Children aren’t born knowing how to queue. They’re not born knowing that they should wait for people to get off a train before boarding. They don’t automatically understand that screaming in a restaurant for an hour affects everyone around them.

They learn these things.

And they learn them from the adults.

Children will be children. They’ll cry, shout, get excited and misbehave. That’s normal.

But there’s a difference between having a child who occasionally makes noise and deciding that everyone else in a restaurant, train or airplane simply has to endure it indefinitely.

The same is true of boundaries.

Children need to learn that other people’s belongings are not theirs. Other people’s bodies are not theirs. Other people’s conversations are not theirs.

And adults need to remember the same things.

Not everything is your business

Some people seem physically incapable of encountering another person’s life without offering an opinion.

What you’re eating.

What you’re wearing.

WHat you’re doing.

Not every thought needs to become a comment.

Not every disagreement requires intervention.

Not every personal decision needs your approval.

Sometimes minding your own business is simply good manners.

The same principle applies to public displays of affection.

Holding hands doesn’t bother me. Neither does a hug or a quick kiss.

But there is a point where affection becomes something more intimate and everyone around you is turned into an unwilling audience.

I don’t care that you’re in love. Good for you.

I just didn’t buy a ticket to your private life.

The disappearing social contract

What bothers me about all of this is not that people are imperfect.

Of course they’re imperfect.

It’s that so many of these behaviors seem to come from the same assumption: I do whatever I want, and everyone else can deal with it.

But shared spaces don’t work that way.

Your freedom doesn’t give you the right to make everyone around you uncomfortable.

You can listen to music. Use headphones.

You can talk to your friend. Keep your voice down.

You can eat. Think about where you’re eating.

You can raise your children however you choose, long as you teach them that other people exist.

You can have an opinion. You don’t have to share it.

You can disagree with someone. You don’t have to disrespect them.

You can refuse to help. You can still do it politely.

Don’t make other people’s lives unnecessarily worse.

That should be an incredibly low bar.

And yet apparently it’s becoming one.

Maybe what we’ve lost isn’t etiquette.

Maybe we’ve become so absorbed in ourselves that we’ve forgotten to notice the people around us.

Good manners aren’t about being proper.

They’re about being considerate.

And perhaps the simplest definition is still the best one: Good manners are what happen when you remember that other people exist.

Food for thought.

Thanks for reading.

Teekay

Take back the night

Maybe your sleep isn’t broken, maybe your schedule is

June 21, 2026 — Leave a comment

The middle sleep vs capitalism

I’ve always felt there was something strange about the way we talk about sleep.

We speak about it as if it should be clean, obedient and uninterrupted.

You go to bed.

You disappear for 8 hours.

You wake up.

You function.

Then you do it all over again the next night.

And when the body does anything else, we treat it like a problem.

Wake up at 2 AM?

Problem.

Lie there thinking?

Problem.

Feel awake for a while, then tired again?

Problem.

Everything becomes a disorder the moment it fails to fit the schedule.

But I’m no longer convinced the schedule is neutral.

I’m not even convinced it’s natural.

Because I’ve lived another kind of sleep.

Not every night. Not perfectly. Not as some routine I’m trying to sell.

But enough to know there is something real there.

I sleep for 4 or 5 hours.

Then I wake up.

Not violently. Not in panic. Not because an alarm ripped me out of my body.

I just wake up.

The world is silent.

Everyone else is asleep.

The air feels different.

My mind feels different.

I pray, then sit in that strange state between sleep and waking, between night and morning, between the body resting and the soul speaking.

And then something opens.

Ideas arrive.

Problems untangle.

Sentences appear.

Things I couldn’t solve during the day suddenly become obvious.

No noise. No demand. No performance. No one needing anything from me.

Just me, the night and whatever rises when the mind is finally left alone.

That’s when I write some of my best work.

The over-controlled mind of the day goes quiet. The part of me that’s always responding, planning, defending, explaining and calculating finally steps aside.

And something deeper speaks.

Then, after a while, my body gets tired again.

So I go back to sleep.

Another few hours.

And somehow, the whole thing feels natural.

Maybe ancient.

Not broken.

Not disordered.

Not like insomnia.

Just ancient.

As if my body remembers something the modern world has tried to erase.

Maybe sleep was never meant to be one single block for everyone.

Maybe the middle of the night wasn’t always an issue to be addressed.

Maybe waking after a few hours wasn’t always something to fear.

Maybe there was a time when the night had two doors: one for rest, one for reflection, then rest again.

Historians have written about segmented sleep, especially in preindustrial Europe. People spoke of a first sleep and a second sleep. Between the two, they might pray, think, talk, make love, tend to small things or simply exist in the dark without immediately diagnosing themselves.

That detail matters.

Because today, when someone wakes in the middle of the night, they don’t usually ask, “What is this moment giving me?”

They ask, “What’s wrong with me?”

That tells us something.

Not only about sleep.

About the society around sleep.

Because modern life doesn’t tolerate rhythms it can’t use.

It sees darkness and calls it wasted time, hence the horrendous daylight saving invention.

It sees silence and tries to fill it.

It sees the body refusing to behave like a machine and immediately asks which product, pill, app, supplement or routine can force it back into obedience.

This is where sleep becomes political.

Sleep itself is natural.

The modern sleep schedule isn’t.

It belongs to work.

To school.

To office hours.

To alarms.

To productivity culture.

To the economic need to make bodies predictable.

Capitalism colonized our sleep.

It took something ancient, intimate and mysterious, then forced it into a format that serves production.

One block.

One alarm.

One workday.

Repeat.

And because we live in a performance-driven society, even rest has to justify itself.

We don’t sleep because the body is sacred.

We sleep so we can function and be productive.

We don’t rest because life is more than work.

We rest so we can return to work less damaged.

Even sleep has been made useful.

Recovery.

Optimization.

Output.

Efficiency.

A better brain.

A better body.

That’s the real sickness.

Not simply lack of sleep.

Not simply insomnia.

A society that can only respect sleep when sleep serves production is very sick.

Nature doesn’t work like that.

Summer is not winter.

December is not June.

The year breathes.

Days stretch and shrink.

Nights lengthen and shorten.

Trees lose their leaves.

Animals slow down.

Light changes.

Energy changes.

Everything adapts except us.

We expect the same output in winter as in summer.

Same wake-up time.

Same productivity.

Same pressure.

Same artificial brightness.

As if the body should be indifferent to the sun.

As if a dark winter morning and a bright summer morning ask the same thing from us.

They don’t.

Winter asks for slowness.

Modern economic life asks for output.

Winter gives us longer nights.

We turn on the lights and carry on.

Then when people collapse, we call it fatigue, burnout, low motivation, seasonal depression or poor sleep hygiene.

Sometimes those words describe something real.

But they can also hide something.

Many people are not failing at rest.

They’re being forced to live against it.

Their rhythm isn’t broken by nature.

It’s broken by a dying society that still demands performance from exhausted bodies.

That’s why I don’t trust most conversations about sleep.

They talk about blue light, magnesium, melatonin, sleep trackers, cold rooms and perfect pillows.

Fine.

Some of that can help.

But they rarely talk about capitalism and all it entails.

Stress.

Work.

Poverty.

Grief.

Debt.

Noise.

Fear.

The nervous system living under constant pressure.

They rarely admit that many people are tired because their lives are built against the body.

Instead, they sell us solutions to problems the system created, the system being capitalism.

You’re stressed, so they sell you sleep content.

You’re overworked, so they sell you recovery hacks.

You’re anxious, so they sell you supplements.

You’re disconnected from nature, so they sell you artificial routines.

You’re exhausted by capitalism, so they sell you wellness.

And the simplest truth is ignored.

Maybe people need less stress.

More time.

More silence.

More prayer.

Work that doesn’t swallow their life.

Enough space to do things that make them happy before their body collapses at night.

Maybe people don’t need to become better machines.

Maybe they need to stop being treated like machines at all.

Science can tell us many useful things about sleep, but it becomes dangerous when it forgets that humans are not only organisms in a lab.

A sleep study can measure the brain.

It can’t fully measure what the night means to a person.

It can’t measure the feeling of waking naturally after 4 or 5 hours, praying in the dark, writing from a place you can’t access during the day, then returning to sleep as if you had visited some hidden room inside yourself.

That room matters.

That middle space matters.

The world has become so loud that we’ve forgotten what the mind does when it’s not being interrupted.

During the day, thought is constantly attacked.

Messages.

Screens.

Tasks.

People.

Plans.

Bills.

Responsibilities.

Even when we’re alone, we’re rarely alone.

But the middle of the night is different.

It gives the mind a privacy the day can’t offer.

Maybe that’s why creativity often lives near sleep, near dreams, near the strange border where the rational mind loosens and something deeper comes forward.

The edge of sleep is not empty.

It’s fertile.

Not always useful in the capitalist sense.

But sometimes revealing.

And that is not the same thing.

That’s why I refuse to see every night waking as a problem.

Sometimes it’s stress, illness or pain.

Sometimes it’s too much worry, too much light or too much life pressing on the chest.

But sometimes, it’s something else.

Sometimes the body wakes because it has entered the second chamber of the night.

The chamber where the ego is quieter.

Where ideas come without being chased.

Then sleep returns.

Not as defeat.

As completion.

First sleep.

A waking.

Second sleep.

A rhythm, a conversation between the body, the soul and the dark.

Maybe that’s what we’ve lost.

The true meaning of sleep.

We reduced it to recovery.

Made it serve productivity.

Turned it into another thing to optimize, track and monetize.

We forgot that sleep is also surrender.

Also mystery.

A borderland.

One of the last places where the body refuses complete control.

That might be why modern life is so obsessed with managing it.

Because sleep reminds us that we’re not machines and never will be.

No matter how many alarms we set.

No matter how many apps we download.

No matter how many experts explain our cycles.

At some point, the body asks to return to the dark.

And maybe, if we stop being afraid of every interruption, we might discover that the night wasn’t only made for unconsciousness.

Maybe part of it was made for meeting ourselves without the noise of the world.

The most human sleep was never a straight line.

It was a tide.

The middle of the night was never the enemy.

The enemy is a society that turned even rest into a performance.

Resist capitalism, take back your sleep.

Thanks for reading.

Tee.

Small changes to improve life

April 24, 2026 — 1 Comment

An interconnected system that made me healthier and more aligned.

You can’t expect your body to function properly if everything you expose it to works against it.

What you touch, what you eat, what you breathe in, what you surround yourself with matters.

Most of these changes didn’t come from theory. They came from small moments of doubt. Something feels off, you look into it, you adjust, and then you don’t go back. Over time, those adjustments start forming a pattern.

  • Plastic was the starting point

Once I started paying attention, plastic was everywhere. Not just single-use items, but containers, cutting boards, utensils, bottles. Even when it’s thick and reusable, it still degrades over time. Microplastics are already present in food and water, so adding more exposure through daily habits made little sense. I removed plastic containers, replaced cutting boards, and shifted entirely to glass, wood, and metal for anything that comes into contact with food. I now store and consume food exclusively using stable, non-degrading materials.

  • Water isn’t neutral

Tap water is often treated as a given, but once you look into what it contains, it changes how you approach it. I invested in a proper filtration system and regret not having done so earlier. Before that, I went with a basic pitcher, the Brita type, then moved to something more advanced (and more expensive) to remove a wider range of contaminants. That said, I also started being more intentional with how I drink water. In the morning, I’ll often have water with cucumber and lemon, and I’ll leave cucumber slices in the bottle throughout the day. Given how much of the body is made up of water (60%, vs 73% for the brain), it doesn’t make sense to treat it casually.

  • Cookware and daily exposure

Cooking used to be about convenience. Non-stick pans, plastic utensils, quick cleaning. Once concerns around certain coatings and chemical residues became more visible, that convenience started to feel like a trade-off. I replaced everything with stainless steel cookware and switched plastic utensils for wood or metal. It requires more attention, but it removes a layer of uncertainty.

  • Eliminating plastic in hygiene products

The same pattern showed up in the bathroom. Most hygiene products come in plastic packaging, and beyond that, their composition raises lots of questions anyway. Shampoo, shower gels, toothpaste, it’s all part of the same system. Moving away from plastic bottles was supposed to be difficult, till it wasn’t. Toothpaste remained the hardest to replace due to cost and availability, though totally doable. Plus, you can make your own, if time allows.
As for shampoo, it’s been close to a decade since I’ve reduced it drastically, once a month on average, and even less in the summer when I’m regularly in the ocean or rivers. When I do use one, it’s always a natural, oil-based, plastic-free option. The rest gets washed with regular, natural soap.

  • Perfumes and what goes through the skin

I used to collect perfumes. At one point I had around thirty bottles. It was part of how I presented myself. Over time, I learned more about what actually goes into most fragrances. They’re not just alcohol and plant extracts. Many contain compounds that interfere with hormonal systems. Applying them directly on the skin, especially around the neck, didn’t make sense anymore. In fact, it became a health hasard. I still use what’s left of my collection, but only and exclusively on my clothes.

  • Body lotions and absorption

That same logic extended to body lotions. At first, plastic packaging was the issue. Then I realized the formulations themselves raised similar concerns. Long-lasting scents rely on chemical stabilizers that don’t just sit on the surface, they penetrate well into our body and weaken our nervous system. I replaced them with simpler alternatives like coconut oil, jojoba oil, and monoi stored in glass bottles. They do what’s needed without unnecessary complexity.

  • Sound, stimulation, and the nervous system

There’s also what we expose our brain to. I used to listen to music at maximum volume for hours every day. Looking back, it’s surprising there wasn’t more damage in my inner ear. More recently, I started questioning constant exposure to wireless ear devices as well. It’s not easy to step away from, but I’ve made adjustments. I use wired earphones more often, reduced how much I listen to anything overall, and capped the volume so it never exceeds 85 decibels on my phone. Silence has taken a bigger place too, especially through long walks.

  • Food as a baseline

Diet was one of the earliest shifts and it stayed consistent. Processed sugars and ultra-processed foods were removed and haven’t come back. The focus is on whole foods, fiber and stable energy rather than spikes. Fermented foods like homemade kefir became part of daily intake to support gut health. Supplements were added with specific purposes. Creatine for performance and recovery, cordyceps and lion’s mane for energy and cognitive support, vitamin D in winter, omega-3 for long-term brain health, turmeric for inflammation. Fruit is eaten whole rather than juiced to avoid unnecessary glucose spikes. Alongside this, I fast intermittently throughout the year, supporting deeper internal regulation. And of course , everything 100% plantbased and palm oil-free.

  • Sun exposure, corrected over time

Sun exposure is another area where I had to adjust. For a long time I approached it carelessly. I even used coconut oil thinking it would protect my skin, when in reality it was doing the opposite. I rarely burned, but that doesn’t mean there was no damage. Over time, I learned to be more controlled. Less direct exposure on the face, protection when needed, and no more chasing tans.

  • Living closer to nature

One of the biggest shifts didn’t come from removing something, but from changing the environment itself. Living closer to nature makes everything easier. Movement, silence, exposure to natural elements. Practices like grounding or earthing stop being abstract ideas and become part of daily life. Walking barefoot, touching the ground, spending time in natural surroundings. There’s a noticeable effect on stress levels, posture, and overall balance. Even something as simple as leaning against a tree or staying still outdoors changes how the body settles. Oh yeah, and tree hugging FTW!

  • Reconnecting with natural signals

Some changes are harder to explain in purely scientific terms, but still feel real in practice. Hair is one of them. There are older ideas about hair acting as a kind of antenna, a connection to the environment. Historically, cutting hair has sometimes been used not only for hygiene but also as a way to strip identity, control individuals, or disconnect them from something deeper, which is why you often see it done immediately in contexts like slavery or imprisonment. Whether or not that idea can be measured, I’ve noticed a difference since growing it out and stopping the use of chemical-heavy products. There’s a stronger sense of awareness and sensitivity, so keep your hair, guy, unless you’re balding, of course !

  • Positive thinking and internal dialogue

Not everything is physical. The way you think shapes how you experience all of this. I’ve always been confident, but intentional self-talk is something else entirely. It requires awareness, especially when you’ve been exposed to environments where things don’t always go well. I’ve been working on reinforcing more constructive internal patterns. At the same time, I’ve developed more understanding for people who lean toward pessimism. Most of the time it’s not a choice. It’s conditioning. Repeated negative experiences shape expectations, and those expectations shape perception. A lot of people judge that without understanding it, don’t be one of them.

  • Interconnectedness

At some point, all of this converges. What you eat, what you drink, what you wear, what you apply to your skin, what you listen to, where you spend your time, it all feeds into the same system. None of these changes exist in isolation. Each one reinforces the others. Once you start seeing that, it becomes difficult to go back to unconscious habits. So, approaching one’s environment and lifestyle as one interconnected system is the key to all this.

Across all these changes, the pattern is consistent. Remove what is unnecessary, reduce synthetic exposure, and replace it with simpler alternatives. When something can’t be avoided, create distance between it and the body. Over time, those small decisions compound, and life gets better.

Thanks for reading.

Teekay

Bedroom sleep by Teekay RM

How to sleep better

March 27, 2026 — Leave a comment

Small changes, big difference.

This was supposed to be a simple blogpost about a few changes I made to improve my health. Nothing deep, nothing structured. But once I started writing, one thing became obvious. Sleep wasn’t just one habit among others, it was the foundation behind them all. So instead of burying it in a longer piece, I pulled it out entirely. This is a focused breakdown of how I reshaped my sleep and nervous system.

Sleep isn’t just rest. It’s not just recovery. It’s something far more subtle, almost something we’ve forgotten how to experience properly. The french refer to sleep as “la petite mort”, or “the little death”. Nas, the legendary rapper also referred to it as “the cousin of death.” We all know something deep takes over when we’re asleep, we just don’t know how deep.

Whether you see that as spiritual, neurological, or both, one thing is certain. Sleep isn’t passive. It’s something you prepare for, something you enter, something you either respect or disrupt.

  • Heart rate is the real gatekeeper

Most people focus on how tired they feel, but that’s not what determines sleep quality. Heart rate does. If it’s elevated when you’re about to fall asleep, the night is compromised before it even starts. You might still pass out, but the depth, recovery and continuity won’t be the same. What’s interesting is how many things influence heart rate. Late meals, drinking too close to bed, blue light, mental stimulation, these are all factors. Sleep doesn’t start when you lie down, it starts hours before.

  • The four-hour rule

One of the most effective ways I found. Simple in theory but harder in practice: Stop eating and drinking about 4 hours before sleep.
When I stick to it, the difference is immediate. My heart rate drops more easily, I don’t wake up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, and my sleep stays uninterrupted. It also extends my fasting window naturally, which supports recovery and deeper cellular processes during the night. I now aim to stop all intake at least 2 to 3 hours before bed, 4 feels long at times..

  • Warm extremities, faster sleep

Another overlooked factor is temperature distribution. If your hands and feet are cold, falling asleep becomes harder because the body struggles to shift into a resting state. I don’t like sleeping in socks, so I use different workarounds to keep my feet warm, like heating pads.

  • Deep pressure and a sense of safety

Sleep is also psychological. The nervous system needs to feel safe enough to let go. One thing that helped more than I expected is using heavier covers or even placing a pillow on top of my torso. That pressure creates a grounding effect. It reduces restlessness and makes it easier to drop into deeper sleep. It’s the same principle behind weighted blankets.

  • Spinal alignment in side positions

Posture doesn’t stop mattering once you’re asleep. I often fall asleep in a fetal position, and adding a pillow between my legs made a clear difference. It keeps my hips aligned, reduces strain on my lower back, and prevents tension from building overnight.

  • No pressure around the waist

I also became sensitive to anything compressing my stomach. Elastic bands started to feel intrusive once I paid attention. So now I have this black pair of very loose shorts with worn-out drawstrings that barely apply any tension. It’s the only piece I can tolerate consistently. Everything else feels restrictive.

  • Sleeping without layers

I didn’t always mind sleeping fully clothed. However, at some point I started waking up overheated and restless. So I adjusted gradually. First to go was the top, then the pants. My body regulates itself better without unnecessary layers.

  • Never sleep in plastic

For some mysterious reason, I used to think fleece was an ideal material. Light, warm, comfortable. But a friend pointed out that it’s just polyester. Plastic. That changed how I looked at it completely. Since then, I’ve moved away from synthetic fabrics in bed. I still own a few fleece items, but only as outer layers. Never directly on the skin and never in bed. So now I mostly sleep in cotton or nothing at all.

  • No charging by the bed

I always knew having devices charging right next to the bed wasn’t ideal, but convenience has a way of creeping back in. Thankfully, my wife reminded to reset that boundary, and I have. Since then, phones charge outside the bedroom. Simple.

  • Sleep as a system

Once all these pieces come together, you stop seeing sleep as a single action. It becomes a system. Timing, temperature, posture, materials, stimulation, all interacting at once. Change one variable and you might feel a difference. Change several, and the entire experience shifts. I don’t see sleep as something I “get” anymore. I see it as something I build, night after night.

Thanks for reading.

Teekay

Sprinter track runner teekay rezeau-merah

Why I misunderstood sprinting for so long and why most people still do

January 19, 2026 — Leave a comment

Insights from a former student-athlete.

I started sprinting in 2004. I made my high school teams, then college teams and for a long time I thought I understood speed. I trained hard, I listened to my coaches, I did what was asked.

I hit my ceiling at some point, then one thing led to another till I completely stopped running. I went into boxing in the meantime, then bodybuilding, and slowly but surely stopped training altogether. I played football here and there, surfed for a brief moment, but it wasn’t sustained. Hiking became my favorite thing. Great for cardio, makes me happy and snappy. I felt right where I belonged.

In 2025, after years of just living and many injuries later, I came back to sprinting as grownup. But this time, I noticed something uncomfortable that became obvious. For most of my early career as a sprinter, I was running fast without truly understanding why or how.

That realization is frustrating because it feels like wasted time, and wasted potential.

In hindsight, I now feel like I never went beyond 80% of my capacity. It wasn’t because of my coaches, I simply didn’t understand what my sport was all about, so today, I want to make sure whoever reads this does, because sprinting culture rarely helps.

  • What sprinting isn’t

Speed is constantly explained using endurance logic. Even the gadgets we use, however technical, aren’t really designed for sprinters. Not at the highest level anyway.

Sprinting, for the longest time, was explained through running more, working harder, suffering more than the competition. That mindset, aka hustle-porn, comes from the fact that long distance running dominates the athletics scene. Endurance events shape how people think training works, even when it doesn’t apply to their sport.

One of the first myths I believed (and most people believe) is that sprinters run a lot. We don’t, at all. I used to, but not anymore. I always assumed volume built speed. Matter of fact, many coaches still believe that, and end up frying their runners.

  • What sprinting actually is

Research has shown that elite sprinters accumulate very little true sprinting volume. Max velocity running is neurologically brutal. You can’t repeat it endlessly without dulling the signal from the brain to the muscles. When the central nervous system is tired, coordination goes first, technique collapses, ground contact times increase and speed vanishes. Running more just teaches you how to run slower. That was the first realization I made when I went back into it. Never again!

Next, I believed gym work was mandatory and that strength automatically meant speed. Lift heavy, get powerful, get fast. Not true! Sprinting happens in time windows so short that slow strength barely matters. What matters is how fast you can apply force and how well you recycle it through tendons and stiffness. I’ve seen athletes with modest lifts run incredibly fast and others with impressive numbers never move well on the track. Strength only matters if it transfers.

Another point, for years I misunderstood elasticity. I thought plyometrics were optional extras or warm up games. Coming back to sprinting made it obvious that elasticity is the bridge between strength and speed. I’m not saying I never heard this beofre, I’m saying I wasn’t mature (or smart) enouigh to understand it.

Tendons storing and releasing energy, joints staying stiff at the right moments, rhythm staying intact under high speed. Bounds, hops, wickets and short accelerations teach the nervous system timing. They turn power into something usable. Without elasticity, power stays trapped.

Speaking of stiffness, it is the mother of all improvement in sprinting, another aspect we hardly talk about, or train.

Body composition myths confused me too. Being muscular doesn’t make you slow. Being lean doesn’t not make you fast. Non functional mass is the issue. Muscle that can’t be expressed within sprint specific contact times is dead weight. Leanness that compromises force output is just as useless. Speed only cares about force, timing and coordination.

Drills were another blind spot. I used to see them as filler. Now I see them as low cost technical rehearsal. Drills allow you to practice posture, front side mechanics and rhythm without frying the nervous system. When speed is high, there is no thinking. The body falls back on patterns. Drills build those patterns.

Last but not least, the biggest lesson I learned in all these years is how important rest is, and I don’t just mean sleep, which is the obvious one. When I was younger, stopping early felt lazy, like I wasn’t hustling enough. Now I know it’s intelligent, the right thing to do even. Speed doesn’t improve inside fatigue, it improves when the nervous system is fresh enough to adapt. That’s why we take long breaks between sprints, to rest the nervous system. Adding sets instead of reps, ending sessions before speed drops, spacing high intensity days and protecting sleep are not soft choices, they’re performance choices.

Looking back, it wish I understood all these things earlier. But sprinting is misunderstood because endurance logic dominates sports in general. Distance runners train more and win more medals overall, so their methods are treated as universal. Well, science and elite experiences say they’re not. Speed lives in a different world.

Sprinting rewards intelligence. The faster you want to be, the smarter you have to train.

Cheers!

Tee

water magic

Water speaks in ways we ignore

August 11, 2025 — Leave a comment

A memory, a teacher, a traveler from space.

Once upon a time, exactly 4.5 billion years ago, Earth was a violent place.

There were no oceans. No rivers, no rain, no life. Just a molten ball of fire and gas, spinning restlessly in space.

And then it came. Not as a storm or a miracle, but as dust, rock, and ice, hurtling through space and crashing into this young planet during what scientists now call the Late Heavy Bombardment.

Over millions of years, icy asteroids and meteorites may have delivered what Earth itself couldn’t produce on its own: water. Drop by drop, this alien substance transformed our planet, cooling its surface, filling its craters, and laying the foundation for every living thing that would ever exist.

In other words, the water in your glass, in your blood, in your tears, may not be from Earth.

This is a common theory among scientists, but how do they back it up?

Well, simply put, traces of deuterium (a form of hydrogen) in Earth’s water match those found in carbon-rich meteorites, not in Earth’s original atmosphere. In other words, water could well be extraterrestrial and we’re walking oceans, born of stardust and comets.

Pretty cool.

“A water molecule is made up of one atom of oxygen and two of hydrogen. Hydrogen was created in the Big Bang, and oxygen in the cores of stars more massive than the Sun. Enormous amounts of water, in gaseous form, exist in the vast stellar nurseries of our galaxy.” – NASA

All that being said, new discoveries have challenged that theory. Science doesn’t care about romance and poetry..

But that’s only the beginning of the story.

Water is alive in ways we’re still discovering

Science has always viewed water as simple H₂O. But the more we look, the more mysterious it becomes.

Water doesn’t just hydrate, it reacts. It listens, and it may even remember!

Case in point, when scientists drill into glaciers in Antarctica or Greenland, they’re not just pulling out ice. They’re pulling out history. Inside those frozen cores are bubbles of ancient air, particles of volcanoes and wildfires, records of rainfall, drought, and dust storms, all preserved in perfect detail. These layers tell us the climate story of Earth going back hundreds of thousands of years.

So yeah, water stores information. It has a memory. It IS a memory, not metaphorically but quite literally.

But what if water also stores something more subtle?

Can water feel ? Like, does it have feelings?

The late Dr. Masaru Emoto, a Japanese researcher, believed it did. In his famous (and controversial) experiments, he exposed water to different words, prayers, music, and intentions, then froze it and photographed the crystals that formed.

On one hand, water blessed with words like “love” or “gratitude” formed stunning, symmetrical snowflake-like shapes. On the other, water exposed to hate, anger, or pollution formed distorted, chaotic patterns.

His work was dismissed by many in the scientific community, as they do. But for others, it cracked open a door. A possibility that consciousness and water might be connected in ways we don’t yet understand.

The mystery of memory in water

In 2009, Luc Montagnier, the Nobel Prize–winning virologist who co-discovered HIV, published a paper suggesting that highly diluted DNA in water emits electromagnetic signals, and that water retains this information even when the DNA is gone.

Another researcher and Swiss chemist, Louis Rey, studied water’s “memory” through thermoluminescence and noticed changes depending on what the water had previously been exposed to.

These findings are controversial, but they echo something ancient cultures have always known:

That water is not just a substance, it’s a carrier. A messenger. A mirror.

Water in religion & spirituality

Across every tradition and belief system, water is sacred.

• In Islam, it is said in the Qur’an: “We made from water every living thing” (21:30). Before drinking or washing, Muslims say “Bismillah”, or In the name of God, inviting His name to bless the water. Then there is the water of Zamzam, a sacred well in Mecca, believed to have sprung miraculously for Hagar and her son Ishmael in the desert. This water is revered for its purity and spiritual significance, and pilgrims often drink it during Hajj and Umrah, and take it home as a cherished gift.

• In Christianity, water baptizes, purifies, rebirths.

• In Buddhism and Taoism, water is a symbol of humility and transformation. It yields but wears down mountains.

• And Bruce Lee, blending martial arts with Eastern philosophy, famously said:

“Be like water, my friend.”

Meaning: stay flexible, formless, adaptive, like the element that takes the shape of whatever holds it, and yet remains itself.

Water teaches us to flow, to remember, and to release.

Our bodies remember too

Our body is made up of about 60% water. Our brain? Closer to 75%.

We are, quite literally, a walking river. Every cell depends on water, not just to survive, but to communicate, to regenerate, to feel.

Our emotions, hormones, sleep, focus, creativity, they all ride on the flow of water inside us.

And yet, for something so vital, we’ve forgotten how rare it is.

Water is scarce and under threat

Earth may be covered in water, but only 0.007% of it is drinkable and accessible. The rest is locked away in oceans, glaciers, or underground.

Meanwhile, pollution, overconsumption, and climate change are drying up and polluting a resource that our very existence relies on. Every environmental campaign is focused on the pollution of air (which causes 7 million deaths a year), which is great, but most campaigns don’t even touch on the irreversible pollution of water (mostly due to the fashion industry and animal breeding). Why? The air is much easier to clean than our fresh water streams. and yet..

Meanwhile, pollution, overconsumption, and climate change are depleting and contaminating a resource essential to our very survival: water. Most environmental campaigns rightly focus on air pollution, which causes 7 million deaths each year btw, but rarely address the irreversible pollution of our freshwater sources, much of it driven by the fashion industry and industrial animal farming. Why? I mean if anything, air is far easier to clean than our streams, rivers, and aquifers..

• The fashion industry produces 20% of global industrial water pollution. Dyes and synthetic materials poison rivers from Asia to South America.

• The meat industry is one of the biggest consumers and polluters of water. One single beef burger requires over 2,000 liters of water to produce. But that’s not it: Waste from livestock contaminates rivers and groundwater. Read about the Green Tide, aka Killer Slime or green algae, a magic seaweed that can kill you in SECONDS, another scandal brushed under the rug because a certain lobby is too powerful to let it be mediatized.

Food production accounts for over a quarter (26%) of global greenhouse gas emissions. 18% of those are due to livestock production. – Stanford

• Plastic and pesticides enter our lakes and oceans at alarming rates. Microplastics have now been found in rainwater and even in unborn babies.

By 2030, the United Nations warns that 40% of people could face severe water scarcity if we don’t act.

Water is strong. It’s self-purifying, patient, ancient. But even it has limits.

A call to return to reverence

We live in a world where water comes from a tap, which is why we forget how sacred it is. We wear clothes made in countries we’ll never visit, eat food raised on land we’ll never see, throw away plastics that outlive us by centuries, and we don’t see the water trails behind them.

But now we know better.

We know that water is more than H₂O. It holds the blueprint of life and the story of our planet. It listens. It reflects us.

So what can we do?

• Plant trees.

• Eat more plants and less dead flesh.

• Repair our clothes.

• Use less plastic and ban single use plastics.

• Speak blessings into our glass.

• Treat water like the rare, cosmic treasure that it is.

Because every drop of water you drink has seen stars. It’s been ice. It’s been vapor. It’s fallen as rain, flowed through rivers, and run through the veins of everything that has ever lived.

And maybe, just maybe, when you speak to it, it remembers you too.

Thanks for reading.

Tee.