France Is Burning Because the System Chose Fire

July 11, 2026 — 1 Comment

France is burning.

8 minute read.

Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Literally.

France is suffocating under one of the worst heatwaves in its history, the third in less than two months.

Schools are closing or changing schedules. Trains are slowing down. Workers are being told to adapt. Older people are urged to stay indoors. Animals are dying in barns. Rivers are warming. Nuclear power stations are struggling to cool their reactors and being closed down. Farmers are watching the sky, hoping for rain that never comes. Cities are discovering, once again, that concrete, asphalt and glass are not neutral materials. They trap heat.

Every heatwave ends the same way.

“We need to adapt.”

Of course we do. Nobody serious argues otherwise. When temperatures reach 40°C, we need shade, cool public spaces, drinking fountains, schools that do not become ovens, hospitals that can keep functioning and cooling in strategic public buildings, especially for older people, children, sick people, outdoor workers and anyone trapped in poorly designed housing.

But adaptation cannot become the polite word for surrender.

The real question is not how we survive longer heatwaves.

The real question is why we continue to organize society in ways that make them worse.

Unfortunately, that’s the conversation many people would rather avoid.

The climate crisis is not a natural disaster in the way an earthquake is. Scientists warned us for decades. Communities raised the alarm. The solutions have been available for years. Yet, governments protected fossil fuel interests. Oil and gas companies expanded production. Executives collected billions. Politicians delayed, negotiated, softened regulations, greenwashed and lied.

This was not inevitable.

It was a political and economic choice.

Now, the same system that chose fire is trying to sell us fans, bottled water, air conditioners, climate insurance, private pools, green capitalism and survival kits.

The house is burning, and someone has opened a shop in the living room.

Heat Is Only the Symptom

The mistake is thinking this is only about high temperatures.

A heatwave is a stress test for almost everything that keeps society running.

It pushes the human body beyond its limits. It kills directly, especially when nights remain hot and people cannot recover. It damages sleep, concentration, heart health and kidney function. It turns classrooms into places where children struggle to learn and workplaces into places where people struggle to work.

It pushes infrastructure to its limits. Railway tracks expand. Roads soften. Electricity grids strain under rising demand. Hospitals become overloaded.

The irony is that ACs draw more power precisely when energy systems are already under pressure. Nuclear plants need cool water, yet rivers become warmer and shallower. The same heat that increases electricity demand can make electricity harder to produce.

It pushes agriculture as well. Cows produce less milk. Chickens die in industrial sheds. Crops dry out and/or suffer damage that only becomes visible weeks or months later. Soil loses moisture. Water restrictions arrive. Harvests shrink. Food prices rise.

Then everyone acts surprised that groceries become more expensive.

The damage does not end when the thermometer falls.

That’s why surviving the next heatwave is not enough.

The Food System Nobody Wants to Discuss

Climate conversations usually focus on transport.

And transport matters. Flying less matters. Driving less whenever possible matters. The World Cup spread across North America is a perfect example of climate absurdity, an event marketed as global unity while sending teams, fans, journalists and sponsors across an entire continent for entertainment.

But another major part of the crisis rarely receives the same attention because it sits on our plates.

Animal agriculture is one of the least efficient uses of land, water, energy and living ecosystems on Earth.

Livestock occupies roughly three quarters to more than four fifths of global agricultural land, depending on how it is measured, once grazing land and crops grown for animal feed are included. Yet, animal products provide only a minority of the world’s calories and protein. One widely cited Science study found that meat, dairy, eggs and aquaculture use about 83% of farmland while supplying just 18% of calories and 37% of protein.

Read that again.

Most of the farmland.

A fraction of the food.

That is not efficiency.

It is ideology disguised as agriculture.

The system produces far more than meat, milk and eggs. It produces methane, deforestation, polluted rivers, antibiotic resistance, dead zones in coastal waters and immense pressure on land and water.

It also produces immense suffering.

During heatwaves, pigs, chickens and cows cannot simply adapt because consumers expect cheap animal products. Ventilation systems fail. Cooling systems are inadequate or absent. Transport trucks become ovens. Poultry dies by the hundreds of thousands. Dairy cows suffer severe heat stress and milk production falls.

Then the industry presents itself as another victim of climate change while helping drive the crisis in the first place.

This is not about blaming someone trying to feed their family on a tight budget.

It is about being honest.

One of the most effective climate actions available to individuals is reducing or eliminating meat, dairy and eggs. Diets centered on plant-based foods reduce greenhouse gas emissions, free land for ecosystem restoration and place less pressure on forests, rivers and water supplies. As the IPCC concludes, diets richer in plant-based foods can significantly reduce emissions.

That does not mean climate change is the fault of ordinary people buying lunch.

It means food is political.

Our plates are connected to forests, rivers, oceans, workers, animals, subsidies and power.

The Great Paradox: Our Love-Hate Relationship with Nature

The Ocean Is Part of the Climate

The ocean may be the most neglected part of the climate conversation.

We rightly describe forests as the lungs of the planet. They deserve that attention. But the ocean is far more essential to life on Earth. It has absorbed more than 90% of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases. It takes in a large share of the carbon dioxide we emit. It produces roughly half of the oxygen we breathe, largely through microscopic phytoplankton.

The ocean is not scenery.

It’s not a backdrop for holidays.

It is one of the reasons this planet is still habitable.

There is something profoundly irrational about destroying marine ecosystems while wondering why the planet keeps overheating.

Industrial fishing is not simply the act of catching fish. It tears apart ecosystems. It removes key species from food webs, kills countless non-target animals and drags heavy nets across the seabed, destroying habitats that took decades, centuries or even millennia to develop.

Bottom trawling is one of the clearest examples. It scrapes the ocean floor like a bulldozer, destroys marine habitats and releases carbon stored in seabed sediments.

Yet this rarely appears in mainstream climate debates.

We are told to fly less, and rightly so.

We are told to drive less, and rightly so.

We are only beginning to hear serious discussion about livestock.

But fishing is still treated as though fish simply appear on supermarket shelves and the ocean can absorb endless extraction without consequence.

It cannot.

If the ocean regulates climate, absorbs carbon dioxide, produces oxygen and stores enormous amounts of heat, protecting marine ecosystems is climate policy.

Eating less fish, or choosing not to eat it at all, is not only an ethical position. It is a climate position.

For those who continue to eat seafood, there is at least an important distinction to make between small-scale fisheries and industrial fleets that empty entire ecosystems.

The ocean is one of Earth’s greatest cooling systems. Protect it at all costs.

Why Air Conditioning Can’t Be the Plan

Air conditioning has an important role.

During extreme heat, it saves lives. Hospitals, schools, care homes, public libraries, emergency shelters and social housing all need effective cooling strategies. No one should die inside an apartment built for a climate that no longer exists.

But air conditioning can’t become our primary response.

Every unit cools an indoor space by releasing heat outdoors. Across an entire city, that extra heat makes streets even hotter, particularly after sunset. Air conditioners also increase electricity demand during the hottest periods of the year. Where electricity still depends on fossil fuels, emissions rise. Even cleaner grids face greater strain as peak demand grows.

Singapore illustrates both the benefits and the limits of this approach.

The city has become highly dependent on cooling. Buildings require constant air conditioning. Those systems release heat into the streets. Outdoor spaces become less comfortable, encouraging people to remain indoors, which increases demand for cooling still further.

The cycle reinforces itself.

That’s not resilience, it’s technological dependence.

We don’t need cities filled with cooled rooms.

We need cities that stay cool in the first place.

We Forgot How to Build for Nature

The most effective cooling technology has existed for millions of years.

Trees.

Not decorative saplings planted in tiny squares of concrete, but mature urban forests and healthy green canopies.

Trees cool cities through shade and evapotranspiration. Temperatures beneath a healthy canopy can be several degrees lower than nearby streets. Grass and soil shaded by trees remain dramatically cooler than asphalt, rooftops and parking lots.

Anyone who has walked barefoot from hot pavement onto shaded grass already understands this without reading a scientific paper.

So why, every time France approaches 40°C, do we talk about buying more air conditioners before planting more trees?

Why do we pave over soil, remove mature trees, expand shopping centres, build vast parking lots and approve developments that trap heat, only to claim that more machines are the answer?

Forests are not simply carbon sinks.

They are climate infrastructure.

They store water, protect biodiversity, stabilise soils, reduce erosion, create humidity and lower temperatures. They make landscapes more resilient long before a heatwave arrives.

Yet even forests are increasingly treated as another industrial resource.

Living ecosystems become timber reserves. Old-growth forests become biomass. Trees are cut down, burned for energy and labelled renewable, while complex ecosystems that took centuries to develop are reduced to units of production.

The same logic appears again and again.

If something can be extracted, it is.

If something can be sold, it is.

The living world is valued less for keeping us alive than for generating another stream of profit.

Water Is Becoming Political

Water is becoming one of the defining political issues of this century.

Yet we still manage it as though nothing has changed.

During droughts, ordinary people are told to take shorter showers. Farmers are asked to reduce irrigation. Small growers are criticised for watering their crops.

Meanwhile, luxury uses fight for exemptions.

Golf courses have become symbols of this contradiction because they expose the politics behind water allocation. While vegetables struggle and ecosystems dry out, perfectly green fairways are often defended. Leisure for the comfortable can receive more protection than food production or ecosystem survival.

Mega-basins reveal the same mindset.

On paper, the idea sounds simple. Capture water in winter and use it during summer.

Reality is more complicated.

Many of these reservoirs are open to the air, increasing evaporation as temperatures rise. They can concentrate control of water in the hands of a limited number of large farms. They often allow water-intensive agricultural models to continue instead of encouraging the transition toward crops and farming systems adapted to the climate that is already arriving.

The question is not whether storing water can ever make sense.

The question is who controls it, who benefits from it and whether it helps transform agriculture or merely postpones change.

A society preparing for the future would treat every drop of freshwater as precious.

Rainwater would be collected wherever possible.

Wastewater would be safely reused.

Leaking infrastructure would be repaired.

Soils would be restored so they can retain moisture.

Cities would remove unnecessary concrete and allow water to return to the ground.

Farmers would receive support to transition toward more resilient practices.

Luxury water use would never be treated as equivalent to drinking water, food production or healthy ecosystems.

The Logic Behind the Crisis

The deeper problem is that our economic system rarely asks what keeps life alive.

It asks what can be sold.

That’s why so many climate conversations end in absurdity.

We’re told to separate our recycling while billionaires fly private jets.

We’re encouraged to feel guilty for driving to work while the richest 1% emits more carbon than billions of people combined.

We’re reminded to save water while enormous data centres consume vast amounts of electricity and freshwater to cool servers powering artificial intelligence, advertising and endless digital consumption.

We debate plastic straws while militaries burn enormous quantities of fuel, flatten cities, destroy farms, poison soil and create another wave of emissions through reconstruction.

The priorities are impossible to ignore once you see them.

The Climate Cost of War

War remains one of the largest blind spots in climate politics.

The climate impact of the war on Gaza has been estimated in the tens of millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent once direct military activity and reconstruction are included.

The opening weeks of the US-Israel war on Iran were estimated to produce several million tonnes of emissions.

Lebanon has accused Israel of ecocide following the destruction of forests, farmland and ecosystems in the south.

Yet military emissions are still treated as though they exist outside the atmosphere.

As though bombs leave no carbon footprint.

As though fighter jets fly on moral complexity.

As though hospitals, schools, roads, farms and homes rebuild themselves without steel, cement, machinery and energy.

We can’t keep pretending these emissions don’t count simply because they’re politically inconvenient.

The pattern is difficult to ignore.

Capitalism drives extraction.

Extraction fuels empire.

Empire produces war.

War destroys societies.

Destruction demands reconstruction.

Reconstruction creates more emissions.

Then we’re told that buying a bamboo toothbrush is the meaningful response.

It is not.

Personal Responsibility Matters, but It Is Not Equal

None of this means personal choices are meaningless.

They matter because they reduce demand for destructive industries, help shift culture and make political demands more credible.

But responsibility is not shared equally.

A working family struggling to pay rent is not comparable to a billionaire with private aircraft, multiple homes, yachts and investments in fossil fuels.

Someone eating the foods they were encouraged to consume from childhood is not comparable to multinational agribusinesses lobbying to protect industrial livestock.

A commuter driving because public transport is inadequate is not comparable to governments that refuse to invest in reliable trains, cycling infrastructure and walkable cities.

The message can’t be that ordinary people are the problem.

The message is that we live inside a system designed to make destructive choices easy, profitable and normal while making better choices more expensive, less accessible or socially unusual.

Recognising that distinction is not about avoiding responsibility.

It is the first step toward directing responsibility where it belongs.

What We Can Do

None of this means waiting for someone else to act.

Some of the simplest changes are still among the most effective.

Eat less meat, or stop eating it.

Eat less fish, or stop eating it. If you choose to keep eating fish, understand the difference between small-scale fisheries and industrial fleets that empty entire ecosystems.

Buy fewer clothes. Buy second hand. Repair what you own. Stop treating fashion as a weekly identity update.

From Cash to Trash: 19 Everyday Things You’re Oversaturated With

Do the same with appliances. Borrow, share, repair and buy used whenever possible.

Build a culture where tools, equipment, transport and household goods are shared instead of endlessly duplicated.

Fly less.

Drive less whenever practical.

Support political parties and movements that take climate change, biodiversity, animal welfare, water management, public services and peace seriously. Voting alone will not solve the crisis, but electing governments that deny climate science, protect fossil fuel interests and normalise war will accelerate it.

Above all, reject fake solutions.

A city with air conditioning but no trees is not prepared.

A country with mega-basins but dying soils is not prepared.

A food system built on industrial animal suffering is not prepared.

A sporting culture that flies millions of people across continents for profit is not prepared.

A digital economy that consumes ever more electricity and water in pursuit of endless growth is not prepared.

A world that treats war as ordinary is not prepared.

France is not ready for what’s coming, and that pains me.

Europe and America aren’t ready either.

The Crisis Behind the Crisis

The tragedy is that even by the narrow standards of economic growth, this system is failing.

Heat kills workers.

It reduces productivity.

It damages harvests.

It weakens infrastructure.

It raises healthcare costs.

It disrupts schools.

It destabilises insurance.

It pushes food prices higher.

It forces governments to spend billions (of our money) responding to disasters they chose not to prevent.

Even someone who cares nothing for animals, forests, rivers, oceans or social justice should recognise one simple reality.

This model is becoming too expensive to sustain itself.

The climate crisis is not only an ecological crisis.

It is a crisis of imagination.

We keep trying to preserve the lifestyle that created the emergency, then call that realism.

But there is nothing realistic about filling unliveable cities with more air conditioners while cutting down trees.

There is nothing realistic about building reservoirs while refusing to transform agriculture.

There is nothing realistic about defending industrial livestock, industrial fishing, fossil fuels, permanent war and luxury consumption while asking ordinary people to adapt.

Realism begins by accepting that an economy built on endless extraction can’t produce a liveable planet.

We don’t need a parasasol over the apocalypse.

We need accountability.

We need to recognise that climate is not a separate issue. It runs through everything.

Our cities.

Our countryside.

Our food.

Our transport.

Our water.

Our forests.

Our oceans.

Our economies.

Our wars.

Not because that sounds radical.

Because the moderate path has become the one driving the crisis.

The planet is not burning because we failed to understand what was happening.

It’s burning because those with the power to change course chose not to.

That choice can still be reversed.

But only if we stop confusing adaptation with acceptance and start confronting the system that keeps choosing fire.

Thanks for reading. Make that change.

Teekay

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.

Living in Bordeaux, mostly pros and some cons

May 19, 2026 — Leave a comment

Bordeaux was never the plan

I never planned on living in Bordeaux.

Like, at all.

I never thought it would become anything close to “home” either. Actually, I don’t even really know what home means.

Not in a fake deep way.

Not in the cliché traveler way where people say “home is wherever the heart is” and then post a picture of an airport window or whatever.

I mean it literally.

I’ve moved too much, traveled too much and lived in too many different places to tie that word neatly to one city, one country, one childhood street or one fixed point on a map.

Some people have that.

A place they come from.

A place that explains them.

A place they can point to and say, yeah, that’s home.

I don’t really have that.

So when I say Bordeaux became important to me, I don’t mean it became home in the normal sense.

I just mean it’s one of the rare places where staying made sense.

And for me, that’s already a lot.

What living in Bordeaux is actually like

I’ve lived in and around Bordeaux for years now, after living in places like New York, Barcelona, Lyon, Buenos Aires, Sydney, Addis Ababa, Penang and Hong Kong.

So this isn’t a tourist guide.

It’s not a “48 hours in Bordeaux” thing.

It’s not about where to take cute pictures, where to drink wine or which square looks best on Instagram.

This is a personal look at what living in Bordeaux is actually like. The beauty, the comfort, the cost, the rain, the summer heat, the transport, the vegan options, the access to nature and the strange feeling of a city that somehow made sense to me.

Somehow, over the years, Bordeaux ended up being the place I stayed the longest.

Funny how these things play out.

What’s also interesting is that it wasn’t because I woke up one day and thought, yes, this is the city where I’m going to build my life.

It just kept making sense to stay a little longer.

Then a little longer again.

I’ve been in France on and off for around 20 years now, which is actually mad when I write it down. At one point I studied in Lyon and listen, Lyon is beautiful. I’m not one of those people who pretends a city is ugly just because I didn’t connect with it.

Lyon has history, architecture, culture, food, all that heavy old French city stuff.

But I never felt that comfortable there.

In fact, when I left Lyon, I genuinely thought I was done with France entirely.

Then one day I drove through Bordeaux and that was kind of it.

Immediate click.

No long intellectual analysis.

No checklist.

No “let me compare quality of life, transport, rent and cultural infrastructure.”

Just a feeling.

Like, ok, I get this place.

That’s it.

And I don’t get many places like that.

The feeling of Bordeaux

Bordeaux is beautiful, but not in a loud way.

That’s probably one of the main reasons I like it.

It doesn’t scream at you.

It’s not trying to be Paris. It’s not trying to impress you with giant towers, endless glass buildings or some fake futuristic skyline.

There are no skyscrapers eating the sky.

No weird corporate city-centre energy making you feel like you accidentally walked into someone’s LinkedIn profile.

There’s light.

There’s air.

There are streets that don’t feel like they’re closing in on you.

If you’ve lived in big cities, you know how quickly you can lose the sky. Everything becomes concrete, traffic, glass, noise, pigeons, people walking too fast, cars everywhere, buildings blocking every bit of openness.

Bordeaux doesn’t feel like that.

At least not to me.

It feels softer.

The town hall is genuinely beautiful. The old churches too. The bridges, the stone buildings, the river, the way the city catches light when the weather changes.

Walking around the centre feels visually calm in a way most cities don’t.

Not perfect.

Not magical.

Just soft.

And I like that.

The best things about living in Bordeaux

One of the best things about Bordeaux is that it feels small enough to understand, but not so small that it feels completely closed.

A lot of people in Bordeaux aren’t even really from Bordeaux. They come from nearby towns, the Arcachon Bay, Paris, other parts of France and sometimes somewhere else entirely, like me.

So the city has this mixed energy.

It feels medium-sized, but socially bigger than it looks on paper.

Not too provincial.

Not too massive.

Not too stuck in itself.

That works for me.

Culture is everywhere too, but again, not in a try-hard way.

Montaigne, Montesquieu, Mauriac, universities, opera, theatres. That whole old intellectual background is just there. And yeah, that sounds a bit like something from a tourist office brochure, but you do feel it.

Not every day.

Not every second.

But it sits in the background.

Also, random fact, Bordeaux was the capital of France three times.

Most people don’t know that.

I love facts like that.

Nature, ocean and weekend escapes

Honestly, one of the best things about living in Bordeaux is how easily you can leave it.

Which sounds like an insult, but it really isn’t.

The ocean is just over an hour away.

And not the kind of beach where you’ve got buildings stacked behind the sand, overpriced ice cream stands and people sitting on top of each other.

I’m talking long Atlantic coastlines, dunes, pine forests, surf towns, wind, space.

A completely different rhythm.

You leave the city and suddenly your body remembers that life doesn’t have to feel so tight all the time.

Further south you’ve got the Pyrenees. Sure, they’re about a 3-hour drive away, but still, close enough for a weekend getaway.

Mountains, lakes, hikes, waterfalls, caves, little villages.

A totally different landscape again.

And if you drive inland, say to the Dordogne, you find quiet villages, old mills, open plains and places where everything slows down without asking for permission.

Bordeaux is one of those cities where a short drive can completely change your environment.

That matters to me.

I need nature around me.

Not as an aesthetic.

Not as a weekend hobby.

I genuinely think I get tense without it.

Transport, walking and cycling

Travel is surprisingly easy for a city this size.

You’ve got flights to a lot of major European cities. Paris, London, Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona, Rome, Istanbul and more.

North Africa is close too, especially Morocco.

Then the TGV gets you to Paris in about two hours, which still feels a bit unreal when you think about it.

From there, everything connects.

You’ve also got trains to Toulouse, Nantes, La Rochelle and other places, plus coaches if you want to travel more slowly into Spain or Portugal.

The city gives you options.

I like places that give you options.

Inside Bordeaux itself, public transport is decent.

Not perfect.

Rush hour can be annoying. The tramway gets packed. Buses can be a bit much sometimes.

But overall, it works.

And the city is walkable, which changes everything.

A city you can walk through is not the same as a city you only pass through.

Cycling is easy too. You can get almost anywhere by bike, which makes owning one feel less like a lifestyle choice and more like common sense.

Just lock it properly.

Actually, lock it very properly.

Bike theft is real.

Weather in Bordeaux

The weather has its own personality.

It rains a lot.

Like, a lot.

People complain about it, but I’ve never really hated Bordeaux rain. Most of the time it doesn’t feel violent or miserable. Not to me anyway.

It feels more like a reset.

Like the city needed to rinse itself off a little.

Summers though?

Yeah.

Summers can be rough.

Sometimes too hot.

I usually leave during peak heat when I can, because Bordeaux in a heatwave is not my favorite version of Bordeaux, that’s for sure.

That’s one thing people should know before moving here.

Bordeaux can look soft and elegant for most of the year, then suddenly become heavy, hot and uncomfortable in summer.

Still beautiful.

But sweaty.

Daily life in Bordeaux

The centre has character.

Small local shops, thrift stores, cafés, concept stores, cobblers, vinyl shops, second-hand electronics, markets.

There’s even a monthly vegan market, which is rare enough to matter in a city this size.

It’s relatively clean and relatively safe too.

People argue about safety a lot, especially online, because apparently everything has to become a dramatic debate now.

But in normal day-to-day life, compared to many urban places, Bordeaux still feels fairly balanced.

There’s greenery as well. Parks, trees, open little pockets of space.

Not enough trees in the very heart of the city in my opinion, and still too many cars, obviously.

But the base is solid.

It’s a city where you can have a normal day without feeling like the city is attacking your nervous system.

That might sound small.

It isn’t.

Cost of living and rent in Bordeaux

Now, let’s not romanticize it too much.

Bordeaux has problems.

Rent is ridiculous for what the city offers in terms of work.

That’s probably one of the biggest contradictions of living here.

The city became desirable, people came, prices went up and now you get this strange gap between the lifestyle Bordeaux sells and the economic reality many people actually live with.

It’s beautiful, yes.

It’s comfortable, yes.

But comfort is never neutral when people are priced out of it.

That’s the thing with cities like Bordeaux. They look soft from the outside, but they still carry all the usual pressures underneath.

Rent.

Work.

Class.

Tourism.

Gentrification.

The slow replacement of ordinary life by polished lifestyle.

It’s not Paris-level brutal, obviously.

But it’s there.

And if you’re thinking of moving to Bordeaux, you should know that the city can be expensive compared to the job opportunities available locally.

Beautiful cities always know how to charge for their beauty.

Vegan life in Bordeaux

Vegan life in Bordeaux is manageable, but limited.

That’s probably the most honest way to put it.

You can find options. You can eat out. You can shop. You can make it work.

But if you’re coming from bigger cities with stronger vegan scenes, Bordeaux will probably feel small.

Not impossible.

Just not abundant.

There’s a monthly vegan market, which I appreciate, and there are some good places around the city, but it’s not the kind of place where vegan food is everywhere without thinking.

You still have to look.

You still have to plan a little.

And sometimes you still end up eating fries and pretending that’s a meal.

It happens.

The downsides of living in Bordeaux

So no, Bordeaux isn’t perfect.

No city is.

Rent is too high.

Transport isn’t cheap.

Bike theft is very real.

Summers can be intense.

Vegan options are still limited compared to bigger cities.

There are still too many cars.

The centre needs more trees.

And there’s this strange seasonal emptiness where a lot of people leave during summer, especially since many residents aren’t originally from there.

The city kind of exhales and partially empties out.

Some people hate that.

I get it.

It can feel peaceful, but also a bit strange, like everyone quietly agreed to disappear at the same time.

Bordeaux can also feel a little too comfortable sometimes.

That might sound like a fake complaint, but I mean it.

Some cities push you. Some cities rough you up. Some cities force you into movement.

Bordeaux doesn’t always do that.

It can soften you.

Which is nice.

Until it isn’t.

So, is Bordeaux a good place to live?

Yes, if you want a beautiful, walkable, culturally rich French city with decent public transport, strong access to the ocean and nature, enough social life to not feel isolated and a softer rhythm than Paris.

No, or not easily, if you need cheap rent, strong local salaries, big-city vegan options, endless nightlife, reliable summer comfort or a city that feels fully alive all year.

For me, Bordeaux isn’t perfect.

But it’s one of the rare places where staying made sense.

And for someone like me, that’s not nothing.

Would I live in Bordeaux again?

Honestly, yes.

In fact, we’re just over an hour away.

I go back almost weekly to volunteer, see friends, run errands or just walk around for a few hours.

And every time, there’s still something.

Not home exactly.

But Bordeaux is one of the few places that ever made me understand why people use that word.

Maybe that’s enough.

If you want to read about another french city I lived in (Lyon), check this article out.

Peace!

Teekay

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

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

Winter knows something we forgot

March 18, 2026 — Leave a comment

You don’t hate winter, you hate how we live through it.

I’m such a winter person. I resisted that idea for years because I don’t particularly enjoy being cold and I absolutely hate humidity, but I’m done arguing with it now.

Winter is my favorite season, the one that makes me feel most alive. Fall comes close behind. Maybe I’m really a fall-first person who only settles once winter arrives. Fall feels like a threshold, a kind of preparation, while winter is the place it all leads to.

Most people say they hate winter, but I don’t even think that’s true. I think they hate winter under capitalism, which is a very different thing.

Winter isn’t simply December 21st to March 20th like we’re taught in school. December 21st is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, the deepest point of darkness. In many ways, that’s peak winter. It’s both the heart of it and the beginning of its slow release.

If you look at older seasonal systems, especially the Celtic calendar, winter is often understood differently. It begins around early November, with Samhain, and transitions toward spring around early February, with Imbolc. I’ve always intuitively aligned with this rhythm, a rhythm that feels more real in the body.

Winter always makes me nostalgic about my childhood. Where you grow up shapes your relationship to it. Below the equator, winter falls during what we call summer months. It’s shorter, less harsh. It’s still winter, but it doesn’t carry the same weight. Above the equator, winter has a presence. It changes everything.

Winter in New York, for example, is unmatched. But to understand it, you have to start with fall. Fall is special in a way that’s hard to replicate. The air sharpens, the leaves start falling, the temperature drops just enough to wake you up. School starts again. People return from summer scatteredness with a sense of purpose. There’s motivation, a quiet hope that something new can begin before the year closes.

Then come the holidays. I don’t celebrate them myself, but I can’t deny the atmosphere. Halloween, with kids everywhere. Thanksgiving, massive in New York. Then the Christmas season, with its films, its smells, its food. Cinnamon, baked goods, warmth. Fall is about getting cozy. It’s about preparing, consciously or not, for winter.

And then winter arrives.

One of my favorite childhood memories is hearing on the radio that a blizzard had shut everything down. Schools closed for days. Travel discouraged. The world paused. I remember the feeling of going back to bed, diving under the blanket, watching the snow fall outside. There was a kind of collective stillness. Everyone was home at the same time, in the middle of the week, which almost never happened.

Winter meant snowball fights with family and friends. Building snowmen. Coming back inside after hours in the cold to drink something hot, cinnamon-heavy or just a simple hot chocolate. Winter also meant shorter days, which I’ve always loved. There’s something honest about darkness arriving early. It forces you inward, and you simply sleep better. At least I do.

Now that I live in a coastal town, winter has taken on a different form. The place empties out. It becomes a ghost town. Only a few locals remain. I can walk through the streets, along the beach, into the forests, and not see anyone. Not hear anyone. Just space, and peace.

Fall here is also the perfect time for mushroom picking. There’s something deeply satisfying about finding your own food, bringing it home, cooking it. I don’t do it as often as I used to, but when I do, it reconnects me to something older than all of this.

Winter also brings unpredictability. Storms, floods, strong winds, snow.

I’ve always been fascinated by storms. There’s something humbling about them. They remind you how small you are without humiliating you. Just placing you back in proportion.

And this is where my relationship with winter becomes more than just aesthetic.

Winter, to me, is supposed to be a time of slowing down. A form of hibernation. Not complete inactivity, but a reduction. A softening. A withdrawal from constant output.

But winter under capitalism is the opposite of that.

It’s when everything accelerates. Black Friday. Christmas consumption. New Year’s, January sales. Valentine’s Day. It becomes a concentrated period of economic extraction. A time where people are pushed to spend more, move more, produce more, exactly when their bodies are asking for less.

I don’t adhere to that. I reject it.

Because biologically, intuitively, winter asks something else from us. Even illness patterns reflect that. People don’t just get sick because of viruses. They get sick because they keep pushing at summer pace in a winter body. They ignore the signal to slow down.

Historically, people understood this. They worked through the year, harvested their crops, prepared for winter. Around the end of October, they gathered, celebrated the end of harvest. And then life shifted. Maintenance replaced expansion. Survival replaced growth.

Nature does the same. Animals retreat. Bears hibernate. Bees cluster. Even plants withdraw into themselves. Winter is not death. It’s conservation.

I sometimes imagine a different life. A cabin. A cycle where summer is for harvesting, fall for preparing, winter for resting. Wood gathered. Food stored. Time spent simply maintaining what’s already there.

Life, at its core, is that simple. But systems built on constant expansion don’t allow simplicity to survive.

Winter, for me, is also about people. Not crowds, but closeness. Seeing friends, family. Sitting together, drinking tea, sharing time without urgency. There’s a different quality to connection in winter. It’s slower, deeper.

Even sports feel different. The air, the light, the coziness of it all. Everything sharpens.

And if I’m honest, part of why I love winter is personal. I’m introverted. I need that inward space. But it’s also something else. A fatigue with what humanity has become. The constant noise, the endless movement, the destruction of everything around us.

Winter feels like a counterforce.

It slows us down whether we like it or not. A storm doesn’t ask for permission. A blizzard doesn’t negotiate. When it hits, everything stops. And in that moment, we’re all equal. No one is above it.

There’s something powerful in that.

To me, winter restores balance. It interrupts the illusion that we can operate at maximum intensity all year long. The shortening of days, the stretching of nights, the way time itself feels heavier, slower, none of that is accidental. It’s a form of design.

Fighting that rhythm has consequences. You see it in people who try to live winter like summer. They burn out. They get anxious. They get sick.

I haven’t had a cold in years. That’s not just because I’m active or because of my diet, though those matter. It’s because I try, as much as possible, to align with that rhythm. To accept that winter is not the time to push.

Winter is about gathering. With nature, with people, with yourself. It’s not about peak productivity. It’s not about consumption. It’s not about proving anything.

It’s about remembering.

And maybe that’s why I love it so much. Because despite everything, despite the systems we’ve built to override it, winter still imposes itself. It reminds us, quietly or violently, that we are not in control of everything.

That there is a rhythm beyond us.

And that we’d probably be better off listening to it.

Thanks for reading.

Teekay.

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 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.

Reasons why we don’t eat honey

May 12, 2025 — 1 Comment

Besides the fact that we don’t “need” to.

Honey comes from bees. Bees are tiny creatures who play a huge role in keeping our planet alive and healthy, I’ll explain how.

Bees are born in beehives, where they grow up, work together, and take care of each other. While most people think bees are just busy flying around, they’re not! They actually have specific “jobs”, or tasks if you will. In fact, each bee has a specific role: some clean the hive, some feed the baby bees, and others go out to find food. Basically, they’re like us, except more advanced, because they don’t pollute, fight over nonsense and hate each other for no reason.

Bees are also pollinators.

When bees buzz from one flower to the next, they’re doing something extremely important known as pollination. Here’s how it works: As bees collect nectar for making honey, they carry pollen from flower to flower. This simple act helps plants grow fruits, veggies, seeds, and even more flowers. Without bees doing their thing, a lot of the food we rely on wouldn’t exist.

Let that sink in for a second.

Case in point, 75% of the food we eat depends on pollinators like bees (WEF). 75 freakin’ percent! Apples, strawberries, cucumbers, almonds, and even coffee all need pollination. So, losing bees would mean most of these foods would disappear, or become extremely rare and expensive.

Besides, pollinators also help plants that grow in the wild. These plants give food and shelter to animals and help keep the air clean. So, pollinators help whole ecosystems survive, not just farms and gardens.

While bees are the most famous pollinators, they’re not the only ones. Butterflies, hummingbirds, bats, moths, beetles, and even some types of ants and wasps also help pollinate plants. However, bees are the most effective because they focus their energy on flowers and carry lots of pollen.

This year (2025), we’ve had the worst honeybee loss in recorded history in the US. In fact, 80% of honeybees died suddenly. We still “don’t know” why (pesticides, it’s pesticides).

So, why don’t we eat honey? Simple: bees make honey to feed themselves and keep their hive alive, especially through the winter. When humans harvest honey, they’re taking away the bees’ own food (and heat) source. To make up for it, beekeepers sometimes replace the honey with sugar water, but that doesn’t give bees the nutrients they need to stay healthy. In fact, just like in humans, too much sugar can weaken their immune systems and make them more vulnerable to disease.

Worse still, to harvest honey, beekeepers often use smoke or chemical fumes to force bees out of their hives. This disorients them, causing stress, panic, and confusion, sometimes even leading them to get lost or die as they flee.

Even though it might not seem harmful at first, stealing honey puts a lot of pressure on bee colonies. It is in fact one of the reasons we’ve seen millions of bees die in recent years.

This is why many vegans consider honey as part of animal exploitation. The more we take from bees and damage their homes, the fewer bees we have, which in turn puts entire ecosystems, and our own food systems, at risk. In numbers, honeybees pollinate a worth of 15 billion dollars of crops in the US only, yearly.

If bees disappear, many plants won’t be pollinated. This means fewer fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Animal species that eat these plants will struggle, and so will the animals that eat them. It’s a chain reaction that could cause entire ecosystems to collapse. Eventually, the extermination of bees would entail food shortages even for us, humans, and thus our death as well.

Humans have long seen themselves as sitting at the top of the pyramid, a concept known as speciesism, but in reality, we’re just one part of a vast, interconnected family of living, sentient beings.

Fascinating facts about bees

Here’s where things get interesting: Plants, being rooted in the ground, carry a small negative electric charge. Interestingly, this charge increases the higher up the plant you go, creating an electric field around the flower itself.

Bees, in contrast, acquire a positive charge during flight due to friction with the air, which causes them to lose electrons. So, as a bee approaches a flower, the opposing electric fields of the bee and the plant begin to interact. This interaction subtly changes the flower’s natural vibrations or signals, imperceptible to humans, but detectable to bees.

When the bee lands on the flower, the positive charge from the bee and the negative charge of the flower neutralize each other almost instantly. This leads to two remarkable outcomes:

The negatively charged pollen from the flower is attracted to and effectively “jumps” onto the positively charged bee;
The flower’s electric field is altered, signaling to other approaching bees that it has already been visited. This change communicates that the flower likely has no nectar left, prompting bees to move on and return later. Mindblowing!

So, flowers use electric fields not just to attract pollinators, but also to communicate whether they still have nectar. They have their own language of electricity, completely imperceptible to us.

Other interesting facts about bees: They can also recognize human faces, communicate with each other through a little dance, and even show signs of emotion. Scientists also suggest bees can count and they might even dream.

What can we do to protect the bees and our soils?

Ban pesticides.

Plant flowers that bees love, like lavender, sunflowers and wildflowers.

Replace honey with the million other alternatives in existence: maple syrup, agave nectar, date syrup, molasses, and even fruit-based syrups work great. Why participate in the extinction of a whole species (and many other would follow suite) when you can avoid it?

Bees may be small, but they are mighty. Taking care of them is not just about saving one species, it’s about saving the world we all share.

Thank you for stopping by. This post was inspired by a conversation with my wife ❤

Peace!

Teekay

Totally unplugged: how to live without electricity (yes you can)

January 27, 2025 — Leave a comment

Millions of people do, no bid deal.

Living without a connection to the grid, and mainly the electric grid is a significant lifestyle change.

As a lifelong explorer and survival enthusiast, I’ve always hoped for the best but prepped for the worst.

Live off the grid by Teekay Rezeau-Merah — Off-grid living, photo by Alex Bierwagen

In most Western countries, fundamental commodities such as electricity, running water, well-maintained roads, and a wide range of goods and services are conveniently accessible. However, life is quite different in other parts of the world.

Travel with me

For instance, when my family and I relocated to Mozambique in 1996, basic provisions like sugar and cooking oil were exceptionally scarce. Similarly, when we moved to Ethiopia in 2004, dairy products and sugar were also in short supply.

Not only that, but during our time in Cape Town (South Africa), Maputo (Mozambique), Algiers (Algeria), Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), and (very briefly) Cairo (Egypt), water scarcity was a prevalent issue, particularly during the summer months.

In fact, we used to get up at 4 AM to fill up our water tanks and jugs.

Unfortunately, water shortages are still widely common, and some fierce battles for control over water have already begun.

Water wars

water scarcity by Teekay Rezeau-Merah — Water battles, Image by Freepik

Take the above-mentioned region of East/North Africa for instance. The Nile River is at the heart of an ongoing battle for water.

Indeed, Ethiopia, Egypt, and Burundi are all entangled in a high-stakes discussion that could reshape their destinies.

Long story short, Ethiopia’s audacious endeavor, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), an engineering marvel rising on the mighty Blue Nile has cause a lot of discussion and anger in that region, rightfully so.

Such an endeavor endangers both Egypt and Burundi, who fear the ripple effects of such a grand project.

An electricity-free lifestyle

oil lamps and candles by Teekay Rezeau-Merah — Oil lamp by Photo by Bernard Tuck

Now, in a perplexing paradox, frequent power outages were extremely common in Ethiopia, and I mean several-times-a-week common, even though Ethiopia possesses ample electricity to meet its population’s needs.

Surprisingly, this occurs because the local government chooses to export their energy to neighboring nations, leaving their own citizens in the dark.

I spent over four years (teenage years) in Ethiopia, over four years of persistent power cuts, so I learned a thing or two about adaptability and ingenious hacks to beat the system.

First of all, I hate artificial (street) lights. One of the things I miss the most about Africa is the tranquil stillness of the night. I always found the incessant intrusion of artificial lights aggressive.
With that being said, I love candles and oil lamps with all my heart. They embody a charm that captivates me entirely. Indeed, candles and oil lamps are a gentle alternative to artificial light, as they gracefully replace it without imposing their presence. Their warm glow is synonymous with coziness, while their soft illumination remains pleasing and comforting to the eyes. Perfection!
Many of us rely on electric utensils and stoves for cooking, not in Africa (not back then at least).
My family always opted for non-electric cooking methods like gas or an outdoor wood-burning stove. Dutch Ovens are also pretty awesome if you want to cook bread and pizzas. No power, no problem.
Food storage: This is a big one. “How did you survive without a fridge?”. First of all, we did have a fridge, it was just turned off most of the time. Since we never had an underground cellar storage (that would’ve saved us the hassle), we had to relearn about ancient cooling techniques, like pot-in-pot coolers (or clay pot coolers).
Here’s how they work: First, you’ll need two terra-cotta pots. Place one (the smaller one) inside the other, allowing for an approximate 3 cm (1.2 in) to 4 cm (1.6 in) gap between them. Fill the gap with sand, then saturate it with water.
Finally, place your fruits and veggies inside the small pot and cover everything with a wet towel.
As the water slowly evaporates from the cooler, heat is taken from the clay pots, keeping the temperature of the food cool inside.
But that’s not the only way to store food, you can also learn about preservation techniques like canning, pickling, and drying.
Heating and cooling: Africa isn’t as hot as they say in movies, it actually gets pretty chilly over there, depending on where you are.
Fun fact: You can ski in Africa. In fact, there’s so much snow in Algeria, Morocco, and South Africa that they have their own ski resorts, with approximately 40 kilometers (25 miles) of ski slopes.
Anyway, one of the most efficient techniques to regulate indoor temperatures is known as “passive solar design”. Passive solar homes use natural ventilation and insulation techniques to regulate the temperature indoors.
However, in colder climates, wood-burning stoves and passive heating methods like thermal mass and efficient insulation are common.
In hotter climates, shading and natural ventilation were our go-to, with evaporative techniques coming in handy (with battery-powered fans).
Water supply: As stated above, we had tankers (or water tanks) in all of our homes. Our water tanks were always placed above the house, allowing for gravity to do the rest.
However, in total transparency, we still relied on an electric current (and water pump) to get the water up there. We used it once to twice a week.
Other methods we used were conventional water wells, hand pumps, and rainwater collection systems. I used to LUHV elaborating and kidgineering rainwater collection systems around the house!
Communication: Well, most of what I’m telling you here went down between 96 and 2010, so iPhones were pretty much nonexistent (for the most part).
However, I did have an MP3, then the first iPod, on which I watched hundreds of movies and my favorite bootlegged series. I used to charge my electronics at school or on our drive home.
We also relied on our landline a lot back then.
Speaking of entertainment, the reason I spent so much time kidgineering and playing outside was that I had no other choice. Video games were a big no-no till I was 15 or 16, so reading, playing board games, puzzles, biking, and pursuing outdoor hobbies was all I did.
I also read the newspapers. No, this wasn’t the ‘70s ^^
Hygiene: Have you ever washed your clothes by hand? And I mean ALL your clothes, not just a pair of socks? Well, I have, and most people still do. It’s no big deal, it’s pretty fun actually.
Human-powered appliances: My grandma (who obviously didn’t live with us) had the best appliance ever made: A hand-cranked coffee grinder.
I loved that thing!
I genuinely believe we need more of this stuff today. It makes life so much more fun.
On a personal level, I’ll always favor an old-school kettle or manual food mill & grinder over new, electric ones. Also, I never owned a microwave.

clay pot cooler or pot-in-pot cooler by Teekay Rezeau_merah — Clay pot cooler by Wikimedia Commons

Final Thoughts

Technology is convenient when used properly and I believe electricity is a blessing to humanity.

However, we ought to reduce our reliance on modern tech and learn how to live simply. As you can see, living without one of the most important inventions known to man, electricity, is doable, though it requires careful planning, resourcefulness, and adaptation to alternative methods. Assessing one’s specific needs and resources is paramount for such an endeavor, but it’s manageable and within everyone’s reach.

Self-reliance is the future.

Thanks for reading.

Peace.

Teekay.