Society

Politics, culture, technology, media, consumerism, capitalism, education

Money

Freedom begins by reducing dependence

August 31, 2026 — Leave a comment

Money is not the foundation of civilization.

It’s the receipt.

We spend our lives chasing numbers on a screen. GDP, stock markets, billionaires, inflation, currencies. We act as if money is the bedrock everything else stands on.

It’s not.

Food is.

Without food, there are no people. No workers, no soldiers, no consumers, no billionaires. Hunger has always been humanity’s first enemy, and every civilization was built around solving that one problem.

But there’s a truth hiding underneath it.

You can’t secure food without energy.

For tens of thousands of years, that energy came from human muscle, animals, rivers and wind. Then we found coal, oil and gas, and suddenly one machine could replace hundreds of people. Fossil fuels didn’t invent energy. They concentrated it. They turned power into something that could be owned, extracted and sold.

That’s when the game changed.

Whoever controls energy controls transport. Whoever controls transport controls food. Whoever controls food controls hunger. And whoever controls hunger controls nations. First it’s a national interest. Then a security interest. Then a reason to send an army.

That’s the real ledger. Everything else is cover. Democracy, freedom, human rights, security. Different century, same script, and the resource underneath it rarely changes. Energy-rich regions have a long history of becoming “unstable” right when a great power needs what’s under their ground. That’s not coincidence. That’s the pattern of intent.

The cruelest part is that even those of us who reject that history still run on its infrastructure. I oppose exploitation, yet I fill my tank and charge my phone. I criticize empire, yet I use electricity flowing through grids built on centuries of extraction. I condemn colonialism while still benefiting from resources mined thousands of kilometers away. None of us stand outside the machine, no matter how loudly we object to it.

Since I can’t opt out of the system, the next best thing is shrinking how much of my life it gets to run. That’s the actual reason I became a minimalist, not the aesthetic.

People think minimalism is white walls and linen shirts and empty apartments.

It’s not. It’s about dependence.

Every unnecessary possession draws on that same energy chain. Every gadget needs electricity. Every trend needs a factory, a cargo ship and something pulled out of the ground to make it. The more you need, the more someone else gets to set the terms of your life.

Freedom isn’t earning enough to consume without limit. Freedom is needing so little that scarcity loses its grip on you.

Markets are built to sell people infinite desires, because a person who always wants more is a person who can always be sold something. Minimalism breaks that loop. It won’t dismantle any empire by itself, but it quietly stops feeding it.

Own less. Need less. Depend less.

Because in a world where power runs on energy, the simplest resistance is deciding how much of it you hand over.

Teekay

ac unit

The end of outside

August 27, 2026 — Leave a comment

The greatest tragedy of global warming is not that the planet is getting hotter.

It’s that humanity is slowly abandoning the outdoors.

We’re sleepwalking into an indoor civilization where the sun becomes something we look at through glass, fresh air is replaced by recycled air, and daily life happens inside sealed boxes connected by roads built for machines instead of people.

We call this adaptation.

I call it surrender.

For most of human history, we survived heat and cold without turning the atmosphere into an appliance. Homes had thick walls and were oriented for natural cooling and heating. Streets were narrow and shaded. Courtyards created airflow. Trees cooled entire neighborhoods.

In the Sonoran desert, on the Arabian peninsula, across the Arctic circle, people lived for thousands of years in the harshest climates on earth, not by avoiding them but by designing for them. Architecture responded to climate because it had to.

Then something changed. Construction stopped answering to climate and started answering to speed and margin. Cheap materials, fast timelines, glass towers that look identical from Dubai to Shanghai to New York City.

This happens under different economic systems in different ways, but under capitalism specifically, the incentive is sharpest and the scale is biggest. We paved cities with concrete, cut down trees, covered skylines with heat trapping glass, and filled streets with cars that turn neighborhoods into furnaces.

Instead of questioning the design, we invented a product to survive it. Every summer gets hotter. Every building gets another compressor. Every apartment becomes another sealed container.

The machine that promises relief quietly becomes part of the world that made relief necessary.

That machine is air conditioning, and naming it here isn’t a knock against it. In 1936, before home AC existed anywhere in the US, a heat wave killed close to five thousand people across the country, most of them in homes with no insulation, no shade, no relief.

That death toll wasn’t inevitable and it wasn’t just bad luck. It happened in the middle of the Dust Bowl, and the Dust Bowl was manufactured. Farmers had stripped the deep rooted native prairie grass, the kind that held moisture and cooled the ground through the plants themselves, and replaced it with shallow rooted wheat grown for profit.

When the drought came, there was nothing left to hold the land together and nothing left to cool it. Indigenous communities had farmed those same plains for centuries without triggering that collapse. The 1936 death toll wasn’t proof that hot places are hostile to humans. It was proof of what happens when land and housing get built for yield instead of for the climate they sit in.

AC didn’t create that problem. It arrived as a patch for a problem that profit driven land use and profit driven construction had manufactured, and it’s remained a patch ever since, papering over bad design instead of fixing it.

That’s the honest version of the argument. Not that AC invented the crisis, but that we reached for the machine instead of reaching for the wall thickness, the window placement, the shade, the airflow that would have made the machine unnecessary in the first place.

Spend time in many hot, humid cities today and you notice something unsettling. The day disappears. Life retreats to dawn and returns after sunset.

Office workers leave an air conditioned apartment, enter an elevator, board an air conditioned train, spend nine hours in an air conditioned office or mall, and return home after dark. Entire days pass without sunlight touching their skin.

Not because they hate nature. Because the city has made nature hostile.

Outside is heat that exhausts you within minutes. Humidity that clings to your lungs. Mosquitoes thriving in a warming climate, carrying diseases that turn an open window into a calculation of risk. Pollution hanging over traffic. The safest option becomes staying inside.

Home stops being shelter. It becomes life support.

The cost is much larger than vitamin D deficiency, though that’s where it starts. Less sun on skin means less vitamin D produced, and vitamin D deficiency is tied to low energy, low mood, and a weaker immune system, which is why people who spend their days sealed away from sunlight tend to get sick more often, not less.

Our bodies evolved with morning light, changing temperatures, wind on our skin, fresh moving air. Circadian rhythms sync to dawn, not to LED panels, and when that sync breaks down, sleep breaks down with it, and disrupted sleep drags hormonal cycles, mood, and energy down with it.

Recycled indoor air adds another layer on top. Research on indoor air quality has linked poor ventilation and recirculated air to worse asthma symptoms and higher rates of respiratory illness, especially in buildings that trade fresh air exchange for sealed, climate controlled comfort.

Even our eyeballs are stretching out of shape. Children who spend most of their days indoors under artificial light are developing myopia at rates that have doubled in some countries in a generation, while the ones who spend two hours a day outdoors are far less likely to need glasses at all.

There’s a crueler twist hiding underneath all of it. Studies comparing people who live in constantly air conditioned spaces to people who live with natural ventilation find that the AC group’s bodies lose the ability to handle heat at all, weaker sweat response, less tolerance, more discomfort at the same temperature a naturally ventilated body handles with ease.

The machine doesn’t just fail to fix our relationship with heat, it erodes our own built in defenses against it, so we need the machine more, not less, the longer we rely on it.

And a life spent moving between sealed rooms is a life spent sitting down. Outdoor space invites movement in a way four walls never will, and the sedentary indoor hours we’ve traded for it are independently linked to weight gain and rising obesity, on top of anything diet explains.

Sleep, mood, hormonal cycles, the air in our lungs, the shape of our eyeballs, our own tolerance for the climate we live in, our own bodies at rest, all bent out of shape by a relationship with the natural world that modern urban life steadily erases.

We’ve normalized breathing recycled air more often than fresh air. That should horrify us.

The cruelest part is the loop that follows. The hotter cities become, the more air conditioners we install. The more compressors run, the more waste heat gets dumped straight back into the streets.

Research on Phoenix Arizona has found that AC waste heat alone pushes nighttime outdoor temperatures up by more than one degree Celsius, right when the heat should be breaking. Elsewhere, modeling done on a city like Paris found that if every building ran AC to hold a comfortable indoor temperature, the waste heat could raise the temperature by up to three and a half degrees Celsius.

The same mechanism behind the Dust Bowl I mentioned earlier is still running quietly in American suburbs today. Grass and trees cool the air through evapotranspiration, water moving up through roots and out through leaves. Strip that away for pavement and clean-cut lawns and you lose all the moisture. The ground stops cooling itself the way it used to, so the heat just builds and kills the remaining grass.

Singapore has more air conditioners per capita than anywhere else in Southeast Asia, and it has also spent years planting rooftop gardens, vertical greenery, and tree canopy to bring outdoor temperatures down.

The greenery helps, but the heat from all those compressors doesn’t disappear just because there are more trees to stand under. As long as the AC stays, the waste heat stays with it. Greening a city while leaving mechanical cooling untouched isn’t the answer, it’s proof that the answer has to include using less of the machine, not just planting around it.

This is capitalism distilled into a single object.

Create the crisis. Sell the adaptation. Repeat.

The future should not be millions of homes humming behind permanently closed windows.

It should be cities dense with trees instead of parking lots. Buildings designed for cross ventilation, thermal mass, and passive solar heating and cooling instead of sealed glass that needs a machine to survive its own design. Public spaces that invite people outdoors instead of shopping malls that replace them. Fewer cars. Less concrete. More shade. More wind. More life.

We don’t need to get better at hiding from the climate. We need to build a world where hiding is no longer necessary, and stop mistaking climate control for control over the climate.

Global warming is not only melting glaciers. It’s melting the very idea of outside. If we accept air conditioned isolation as the endpoint of civilization, we’ve accepted far more than a hotter planet.

We’ve accepted the disappearance of human life beneath the open sky.

Teekay

Mass tourism = human pollution

Why Overtourism Is a Capitalist Crisis

August 25, 2026 — Leave a comment

The tourist didn’t design the system that made travel a substitute for a life worth living.

A new form of environmental propaganda has quietly become mainstream.

Every week, another headline appears telling ordinary people they are responsible for climate change, then hands down the same list of penances. Drive less. Fly less. Stop buying this. Stop enjoying that. Recently, Le Monde highlighted that tourism accounts for around 9% of global CO2 emissions.

The number itself bothers me. It’s huge, and mass tourism is something I have no patience for.

The framing bothered me even more.

Once again, the spotlight was placed on ordinary people instead of the system that shapes almost every decision they make.

It’s becoming increasingly common to hear the same message.

You’re responsible.

You’re the polluter.

You’re destroying the planet.

Study. Work. Pay your bills. Repeat. But if you finally manage to save enough money for a vacation, you’re suddenly made to feel guilty for that too.

That is not environmentalism.

That is misdirection.

Anyone who reads my essays knows I take my environmental footprint seriously. The choices behind that, the minimalism, going vegan, the way I get around, weren’t picked up to look good or fit in. They came out of years of reflection.

I’ve been a minimalist for nearly a decade because endless consumption makes neither people nor the planet happier.

I’m vegan because I care about animals. I also recognize the immense environmental cost of industrial animal agriculture, from habitat destruction to food waste and greenhouse gas emissions.

I buy second hand exclusively and repair things before replacing them. I don’t buy new clothes. I’d rather walk or take public transportation than drive, and I’d rather borrow or share something than own it outright, because half the stuff we buy individually just sits there waiting to be used once a year. I’ve taken a nine hour bus instead of a forty five minute flight to the same destination, more than once, because the extra hours felt like a small price for the difference in footprint. I believe we should leave this world better than we found it.

None of that makes me exceptional. It just means I got lucky, or stubborn, enough to question habits most people never get the chance to question, because those habits get taught before we’re old enough to notice them.

Unlike wild animals, humans cannot realistically leave no trace at all. We build, consume, and transform our surroundings. But we can choose to leave as little trace as possible.

That responsibility matters.

What I reject is the idea that environmental collapse is primarily the consequence of millions of individuals making bad personal choices, as if those choices appeared out of nowhere.

They didn’t.

We’re born into a world that treats consumption as the default. Questioning it comes later, if at all, because most people spend their lives just trying to survive rent, survive the cost of food and shelter. Then, once that survival eases up even a little, we try to make up for lost time. We overconsume to compensate for what we never had, the same way anyone leaving poverty tends to, emulating the people who always had the means. “Treat yourself. You earned it. You worked hard for it.”

Individualism finishes the job from there. Look after your own happiness first, leave everyone else’s problems to someone else. That isn’t a flaw people are born with. It’s a job someone trained us for.

So yes, individuals are responsible for what they do. But the system is responsible for how most individuals were shaped to behave in the first place, and pretending otherwise lets the actual architects of the mess off the hook.

The system was built so individuals would fit inside it, and it worked well enough that the individual is now a piece of the machine that keeps breaking us. That’s what makes escape so hard. It isn’t one bad law or one greedy company standing in the way. It’s advertising, employers, housing, food systems, culture, and habit all pulling the same direction at once, thousands of small parts that don’t need to coordinate because they all reward the same behavior. No amount of individual willpower gets the masses out of a system built from that many interlocking pieces. You can opt out personally. The system barely notices.

Now, does tourism have environmental impacts?

Absolutely.

Mass tourism damages ecosystems. It strains local infrastructure. It raises housing prices. It pollutes coastlines. It turns historic neighborhoods into amusement parks. Entire cities are transformed into products designed for visitors instead of homes for residents.

These are real problems.

But they’re not caused by tourists wanting to see the world. They’re caused by an industry that’s turned that desire into something to sell as much of as possible, to as many people as possible, regardless of what the planet or the destination can absorb.

That distinction matters.

And here’s the part that should actually worry us. Right now, only a small share of the world’s population can afford to travel the way tourism gets discussed in Le Monde or anywhere else. If everyone on earth consumed the way the average French person does, we’d need close to three planets to sustain it. Live like the average American and the number climbs higher still.

The uncomfortable truth is that the planet is only holding together because most of humanity is still too poor to consume like the wealthy world does. As more of that population gets richer, and some of it will, that 9% doesn’t stay at 9%. It grows, the same way every other consumption metric grows when purchasing power spreads. We’re not looking at a stable number. We’re looking at a preview.

I also have for a long time questioned whether much of what we call tourism today is even about travel anymore. My work attests to that.

For many people, traveling is just another form of consumption.

They fly somewhere, stay in the same spots, eat at the same chain restaurants, shop in the same luxury stores, and return home with thousands of photos that exist mainly to prove they were there.

The destination changes.

The lifestyle doesn’t.

Social media has accelerated this transformation. Many destinations are no longer visited because they offer something meaningful. They’re visited because their images perform well online.

Travel becomes content.

Experiences become status symbols.

Places become backdrops.

This isn’t the industry malfunctioning. It’s the industry working exactly as designed. Travel companies exist to grow. Growth means selling more trips to more people more often, and the easiest way to do that is to sell travel as a reward, a treat, a thing you’ve earned and deserve, the same script used to sell everything else. Advertise the escape, not the destination. Call it self care. Call it living your best life. The vacation guilt the headlines produce and the vacation obsession the industry produces come from the same machine. One hand points the finger, the other hand keeps the conveyor belt running.

I think it reflects something much deeper than the shallowness of the masses.

Many people feel disconnected from their work, their communities, and even themselves. Life often revolves around earning enough money to repeat the same routine next week. Under these conditions, vacations become less about discovery and more about escape.

People aren’t always searching for another country.

They’re searching for relief.

Give people meaningful work. Give them stronger communities. Give them time with family. Give them parks, culture, nature, and purpose close to home.

Many would feel far less pressure to chase an escape valve on the other side of the planet every summer.

There will always be genuine explorers.

Some people are naturally driven to understand different cultures, ecosystems, languages, and ways of living. They travel to learn, to question their assumptions, and to return home with ideas worth sharing.

I’d guess that’s a minority. Watch how travel actually gets consumed, the itineraries, the photo spots, the same five restaurants recommended to everyone, and it’s hard to conclude that curiosity is the main thing driving most of it.

Historically, travel served the purpose of learning through exploration rather than consumption. People left home to study, exchange knowledge, observe other societies, and bring back innovations that improved their own communities.

Travel wasn’t simply about extracting something from a place.

It was about growing through them.

Today, too much tourism encourages the opposite. It treats landscapes the way it treats products, something to use up and move on from. It’s also flattening a diverse world into sameness.

That isn’t a failure of human nature.

It’s a predictable outcome of an economic system that turns everything into something to be bought and sold.

So yes, I oppose mass tourism. I absolutely do.

I oppose cruise ships that poison the oceans they sail through before dumping their waste in port cities and leaving.

I oppose short weekend flights taken simply because they’re cheap.

I oppose cities being redesigned for visitors while residents are priced out.

I oppose zoos and circuses that trade animal suffering for entertainment.

I oppose beachfront developments that sell the view and never mention what it cost to build.

I even oppose ecotourism, most of the time it’s just greenwashed tourism for the rich, another way to price out ordinary people while the outcome stays the same.

None of that makes the tourist the offender. An industry built to sell escape, and paid handsomely for doing it, is the one that turned a personal desire into an ecological liability.

The system is the culprit.

The environmental crisis will not be solved by making people feel guilty for taking a vacation. Most don’t even care.

It starts with education, teaching people to question the conditioning instead of just living inside it.

From there, it will be solved by degrowth. Not for the nation building its first hospitals or its first clean water system, that’s need. Degrowth is for the societies that already have what they need and keep manufacturing new needs anyway, the Emirates building another amusement park in the desert, Nevada building another casino with a golf course attached. One is need. The other is appetite dressed up as progress.

We already own enough clothes to dress the world for generations. The pile sitting in circulation right now would outlast most of us several times over, yet the fashion industry keeps manufacturing seasonal trends to convince us otherwise. That’s the target. That’s where degrowth should appear.

Less consumerism. Less unnecessary work. Eating plant based, living with less, minimalism as a norm rather than a lifestyle choice for the few. More shared economy and less of the individualism that trains us to treat our own comfort as the only thing worth protecting.

Degrowth looks like communities that function without a car and a credit card for every errand, hobbies that give something back instead of costing something, planting trees and cleaning rivers instead of shopping malls and card tables in casinos.

It looks like people who no longer need two weeks a year on the other side of the planet to remember they’re alive, because the other fifty weeks stopped feeling like a sentence.

Until we are willing to confront that reality, the headlines will keep telling you to fly less while the industry keeps telling you to fly more, and both of them profit from you never noticing it’s the same voice. Guilt won’t shrink a system built to keep expanding. Only pulling its foundations out will.

That’s the trip actually worth taking. And unlike the one on the brochure, nobody’s selling it to you.

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

Cu Chi tunnels

The Bomb Craters That Became Bunkers Beneath Cu Chi

August 19, 2026 — Leave a comment

On the American War, working with nature and the remarkable ingenuity of the Vietnamese resistance

Of the three things I wanted to see around Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), Cu Chi was the one I almost didn’t care about.

It was last on my list. It ended up being first in my mind.

I thought I knew the American War in Vietnam fairly well.

Turns out, I barely knew anything.

Cu Chi is a district outside Saigon where Vietnamese forces and civilians built a vast underground network during the American War. At its height, the tunnel system stretched for hundreds of kilometers beneath the jungle, allowing soldiers and civilians to live, move, fight and hide underground while American forces tried to destroy them from above.

Before I go any further, a special shoutout to our guide, Dragonking. Without his explanations, I would’ve walked away thinking I’d visited a fascinating historical site. Instead, I left with an entirely different way of looking at war, nature and human ingenuity.

The first thing he explained completely changed the way I looked at the tunnels.

Most people imagine that someone simply decided to dig more than 250 kilometers of tunnels beneath the jungle.

That’s not how it happened.

When American bombs carved enormous craters into the earth, the Vietnamese didn’t waste time filling them back in.

They used them.

A bomb crater became a bunker, built in a single night, without electricity, without machinery, without floodlights. The crater became the room. Trees, bamboo and clay hid it from above. Once the bunker was finished, they dug a tunnel to the next crater, then the next, then the next. Little by little, hundreds of isolated shelters became one of the most extraordinary underground networks ever built.

I kept waiting for Dragonking to move on to the next fact, the next date, the next number. He didn’t. He kept circling back to that same crater, that same night, as if the story wasn’t really about tunnels at all.

It wasn’t.

Along this trip, I realized I wasn’t learning about tunnels. I was learning about a completely different relationship with the world.

The deeper he went into the explanations, the more I noticed the same pattern repeating itself, over and over, in everything he described. Nothing existed on its own. Everything worked together.

The clay hid the entrances. The bamboo became pipes, supports and traps. The trees concealed the bunkers. Termite mounds inspired ventilation shafts that disappeared into the landscape. Some exits near the Saigon River even benefited from the natural movement of the tides to help circulate fresh air.

Smoke from cooking, something that could reveal an entire position, wasn’t simply vented into the air. It traveled through long underground channels before escaping so gradually that it blended into the morning mist rising through the forest.

None of it was borrowed and none of it was forced. Every part of the jungle already had a use, and they just had to notice it. Standing there, I couldn’t think of it as people surviving despite their surroundings. They were becoming part of them.

The tunnels themselves followed exactly the same philosophy. They weren’t designed to be comfortable. They were designed to favor the people who knew them.

Three underground levels housed kitchens, meeting rooms, hospitals, workshops, sleeping quarters and armories. Above them lay a maze of narrow passages, hidden doors and deadly traps. Punji stake pits, swinging spike traps and concealed trapdoors meant that even if an American soldier managed to enter, he had no idea where he was, where he was going or what waited around the next corner.

The jungle wasn’t protecting the tunnels. The tunnels were an extension of the jungle.

Then came the underground workshops, and this part genuinely left me speechless. When American bombs, artillery shells or rockets failed to explode, the Vietnamese collected them. They emptied the explosives to manufacture land mines. They cut up the steel to make traps. The enemy’s weapons became the tools of their own resistance.

Again, the same idea. Nothing was wasted. Everything was transformed.

By then, I stopped seeing individual examples. I started seeing a philosophy.

One side arrived with industrial warfare. Bombers. Napalm. Heavy machinery. The belief that overwhelming force could solve everything.

The other answered with clay, with bamboo, with rivers, with trees, with insects, with patience, with an intimate knowledge of the land they called home.

That’s probably why Cu Chi affected me so much. It wasn’t simply a story about winning a war. It was a story about understanding your environment so deeply that it becomes part of you.

Modern warfare usually leaves behind dead forests, poisoned rivers and landscapes stripped of life. Cu Chi tells another story. It reminds us that our greatest strength has never been our ability to dominate nature. It’s been our ability to work with it.

The Vietnamese didn’t separate themselves from the forest. They became an extension of it.

None of that erases what freedom cost here. No one should ever romanticize war, and nothing about those tunnels was easy or bloodless. But standing in them, one thing became impossible to ignore. The Vietnamese didn’t defeat a superpower by having more. They won by understanding something their enemy never truly could.

The land beneath their feet.

Thanks for reading.

Teekay

Backpacking

Backpacking lost its soul

August 18, 2026 — Leave a comment

On the ego that turned exploration into consumption.

People often ask why I spend weeks in one place when I could be crossing several countries off my list instead. I suppose I’ve never understood how moving more is supposed to mean seeing more.

I don’t travel to collect countries.

I travel to disappear into one.

Backpackers don’t stay anywhere anymore.

They arrive. They sleep. They photograph. They publish. They leave.

Then they repeat the process somewhere else until the trip ends and they return home exhausted, convinced they’ve seen the world because they were physically present in it.

They haven’t.

They’ve consumed it.

That’s what backpacking has become.

Not exploration.

Consumption.

Call me a gatekeeper if you want, but I don’t think making travel accessible to everyone was a good thing.

Some things deserve to remain difficult.

Difficulty isn’t just an obstacle.

It’s a filter.

Backpacking once demanded uncertainty. You hitchhiked because there wasn’t another option. You camped because you couldn’t afford hotels. You got lost because Google Maps didn’t exist. You depended on strangers because there was nobody else.

You didn’t stay three weeks because slow travel was fashionable.

You stayed because leaving wasn’t simple.

That difficulty selected people.

Not better people.

People with different motivations.

People who wanted to understand rather than display.

Then technology removed almost every barrier.

Flights became cheap.

Hostels multiplied.

Google Maps eliminated uncertainty.

Translation apps eliminated effort.

Social media eliminated the need to tell stories because photographs could pretend to tell them for you.

The filter disappeared.

The culture changed.

Today, travel isn’t sold as curiosity.

It’s sold as identity.

The tourism industry doesn’t ask what a country might teach you.

It asks who you’ll become once other people know you’ve been there.

Travel has become one of the cheapest ways to manufacture an identity.

You don’t need to become interesting.

You just need to stand somewhere interesting.

That’s why so many people return with bigger egos instead of broader minds.

Ask them what they learned.

Most will tell you what they saw.

Ask them about the people.

They’ll tell you about the monuments.

Ask them about the language.

They’ll proudly repeat the three words they learned after spending 90 days crossing six countries.

They’re collecting locations, not understanding and certainly not growth.

Tourism has become another branch of consumerism.

Countries are products.

Experiences are products.

Cultures are products.

Even people become products.

Everything exists to be consumed, photographed and replaced by the next destination.

The strangest part is how proud we are of this.

“I’ve been to 25 countries.“

Why is that impressive?

Wouldn’t it be more impressive to deeply understand one?

To speak its language.

To know its neighborhoods instead of its viewpoints.

To have friends instead of recommendations.

To return home with your certainties broken instead of your passport filled.

Movement has become confused with growth.

They’re not the same thing.

Most people don’t travel to become different.

They travel to confirm the person they already believe themselves to be.

Travel becomes evidence.

Proof that they’re adventurous.

Proof of their supposed open-mindedness, despite the racist behavior they display toward locals.

Proof that they’re successful.

It’s ego disguised as curiosity.

The environmental hypocrisy follows naturally.

People cry in front of ancient forests before buying products linked to deforestation.

They snorkel around coral reefs while financing industries that destroy them.

They admire wild animals, then return home and continue consuming the system driving those animals toward extinction.

Nature isn’t changing them.

It’s entertaining them.

People tell me tourism creates conservation.

I think that’s backwards.

Conservation is usually the bill we pay after treating the natural world like a warehouse.

The less we consume, the less there is to rescue.

The same thing happens with culture.

We’re constantly told cultural exchange is inherently beautiful.

Sometimes it is.

Sometimes it spreads destructive habits faster than wisdom.

The world is becoming culturally flatter.

Walk through enough cities and they begin to blur together.

The same cafés.

The same apartment blocks.

The same shopping streets.

The same influencers taking the same photographs.

We’ve mistaken imitation for development.

We’ve decided that progress means looking like whoever industrialized first.

Traditional architecture disappears because concrete and glass looks richer.

Buildings that evolved over centuries to suit local climates are demolished so cities can resemble places they were never meant to resemble.

I don’t call that progress.

I call it forgetting.

A yurt isn’t inferior because it doesn’t resemble a skyscraper.

An earth house isn’t backward because it isn’t made of concrete.

Architecture should answer the climate before it answers fashion.

A society should adapt to its environment before adapting to global trends.

That’s my definition of progress.

Better adaptation.

Not better imitation.

The same principle applies everywhere.

The easier photography became, the less people learned photography.

The easier publishing became, the less people learned to write.

The easier backpacking became, the more it became tourism.

Convenience doesn’t simply allow more people to participate.

It changes why they participate.

And once the reason changes, the activity changes with it.

That’s what happened to travel.

The greatest journeys aren’t measured by distance.

They’re measured by transformation.

You should come home questioning yourself more than the people you visited.

If all you brought back were photographs, opinions and a stronger sense of your own importance, then you didn’t really travel.

You consumed another place.

The tragedy isn’t that the world became accessible.

The tragedy is that accessibility turned one of humanity’s greatest opportunities for humility into another marketplace for ego.

Backpacking didn’t disappear.

Its soul did.

Thanks for reading.

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

Lacanau océan beach by Teekay

How France Became Home

August 15, 2026 — Leave a comment

On migration, belonging and home

People often ask me why I settled in France.

It’s a fair question.

I’ve lived in enough countries that staying anywhere probably seems unexpected. If I met someone who had spent years moving across continents only to settle in one place, I’d ask the same thing.

But I think they’re asking the wrong question.

The real question isn’t why I chose France.

It’s how a foreign country slowly became my country.

Not legally.

Humanly.

People often say a place “feels like home.”

I’ve never liked that expression because it tells us nothing.

Home isn’t something you feel the day you arrive. It’s something you build so gradually that, one day, you realize you’ve stopped looking elsewhere.

That wasn’t immediate.

When I first moved to France, I came to study. Like every newcomer, I was an outsider trying to understand unfamiliar customs, another language, a different way of living. I had no idea that the people I met during my first days in business school would still be among my closest friends a decade later. I didn’t know the colleagues I’d work alongside, the associations I’d join or the teammates I’d train with would become part of my life in ways I couldn’t have imagined.

France didn’t simply welcome me.

It became a part of me.

I learned its language until it became almost as natural as my own. I immersed myself in its history, geography and culture, not because I had to, but because I wanted to understand the place I was living in.

I studied here, worked here, volunteered here and explored it far beyond what any tourist ever would.

I’ve lived in Lyon, in the east, and on the Atlantic coast, completely west. Two places that could hardly be more different, and I’ve traveled through more than a dozen cities, each adding another layer to my understanding of the country.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped being a visitor.

Not because I received a document.

Because I became invested.

What I love most about France.

It isn’t the monuments, though they’re amazing.

Tourists remember monuments.

Residents remember people.

When I think about France, I don’t picture the Eiffel Tower or postcard villages.

I picture birthdays.

Barbecues that stretched long after sunset.

Entire afternoons at the beach.

Summer days by the lake, in the mountains.

New Year’s Eve celebrations with friends who’ve become family.

Late-night conversations that somehow always lasted longer than expected.

Afterworks that turned into debates about everything and nothing.

Association events where strangers became lifelong friends.

I don’t think about France as a collection of places.

I think of it as a collection of people.

Today, almost every part of the country reminds me of someone I love.

Friends in Bordeaux, Lacanau, Lyon, Paris, Strasbourg, Poitiers, and much more.

Family in Angers, Laval, Rochefort, Nice.

Those cities are no longer dots on a map.

They’re invitations.

They’re stories.

They’re people waiting for me.

That’s something I never expected when I first arrived.

France also gave me something I struggled to find elsewhere.

Depth.

I’ve lived in countries where people were incredibly friendly yet relationships rarely moved beyond the surface. Australia is a good example. People were kind, generous and always willing to help, but I never found the deep friendships I was searching for. It simply wasn’t a social culture that suited me.

In France, friendships often take longer to build.

But once they exist, they become remarkably strong.

People invite you into their homes.

Into their families.

Into their lives.

They challenge your ideas, celebrate your successes and stay beside you during difficult times.

That’s the kind of friendship I’ve always valued.

Another reason I stayed is nature.

Anyone who’s read my work knows how deeply I care about the natural world.

After traveling through many countries, I became increasingly aware of how differently societies treat their environment. I’ve seen breathtaking landscapes buried under litter, rivers treated as dumping grounds and forests disappearing with barely a second thought.

France isn’t perfect.

No country is.

But I’ve always felt that people here still recognize that nature deserves protection. National parks, coastal paths, forests, mountains, local environmental groups and countless volunteers reflect a culture that, despite its contradictions, still understands that these places matter.

That matters to me.

Because I don’t just enjoy beautiful landscapes.

I feel responsible for them.

The day you begin worrying about a country’s forests, rivers and coastline as if they were your own, something has changed.

The greatest gift.

The greatest gift France gave me wasn’t professional, cultural or even philosophical.

It was personal.

It’s where I met the woman who changed my life.

Through her, I didn’t just find a partner.

I found another family.

After years of moving from place to place, having a family here changed everything.

Belonging.

People sometimes think belonging comes from your environment.

I don’t.

I think belonging comes from participation.

From showing up.

From learning the language instead of expecting everyone else to speak yours.

From contributing to your community.

From joining local associations.

From building friendships that survive distance and time.

From caring about the country’s future even when you’re frustrated by its present.

France has many flaws.

I hope it becomes safer for women and vulnerable people.

I hope its social model regains the strength that has weakened over the past decade.

I criticize those things precisely because I care.

Indifference belongs to tourists, responsibility belongs to those who intend to stay.

Maybe one day I’ll officially become French.

If that happens, a passport won’t suddenly make me belong.

It will simply recognize something that has been growing for years.

People often ask why I chose France.

The truth is more complicated.

I chose France.

But France chose me too.

Not through luck.

Through thousands of ordinary moments.

Conversations.

Shared meals.

Volunteer projects.

Family gatherings.

Train rides across the country.

Days by the ocean.

Years spent building a life alongside people who slowly became part of it.

I wasn’t looking for the perfect country.

I was looking for the place where my actions mattered more than my passport.

After all these years, when I think about France, I don’t see a map.

I see faces.

And I can’t think of a better definition of belonging than that.

Thanks for reading.

Teekay

disposable fuji camera

The Photograph Has Become the Experience

August 14, 2026 — Leave a comment

When life becomes content.

I thought about this while walking around Penang.

Earlier one afternoon, I saw a couple doing something so common that most people probably don’t notice it anymore. The man was standing in the heat, waiting for his girlfriend to cross a street so he could film her.

There was nothing happening on the street. No traffic to avoid. No particular reason for them to stop.

He was simply waiting for the shot.

She crossed.

He filmed.

Then they moved on.

They weren’t visiting Penang.

They were documenting themselves visiting Penang.

Several hours later, I saw something considerably darker.

A family. A father, a mother and their young daughter.

It was nighttime and they were walking along a quiet street. Nearby was a building with attractive illuminated signs, the kind of aesthetic social media loves.

The mother wanted a picture.

She gave her phone to her husband and crossed the road by herself.

Their six-year-old daughter had been playing a video game on her own phone. When she saw her mother getting ready for the photograph, she naturally wanted to join her.

She wanted a picture with her mother.

Her mother didn’t want her there.

She told the daughter to stay away so her husband could photograph her alone in front of the building.

The father then grabbed his little girl’s arm and moved her behind him, keeping her out of the frame while he photographed his wife.

The girl looked crushed.

And almost immediately, she went back to staring at her screen.

There is something profoundly unsettling about that.

A little girl of about six saw her mother posing for a photo and wanted to be part of it. She wasn’t demanding anything unreasonable. She wasn’t ruining an important moment.

She simply wanted to be beside her mom. Her mother rejected her because she wanted the photograph to be about herself.

The photograph mattered more than the child.

When a child learns that their presence is inconvenient whenever it interferes with a parent’s image, the trauma can stay with them far longer than the parent realizes.

And for what?

A photograph in front of a building.

A photograph that will probably be forgotten within days.

A photograph that exists primarily to tell other people, “Look where I am”.

This is where our obsession with photography becomes darker than simply taking too many pictures.

We’ve started treating other human beings as props.

And this isn’t limited to excluding children from the frame. Sometimes parents do the opposite and deliberately make their children part of the image they’re constructing.

There are mothers who use their own children to photograph them in deliberately provocative poses, sometimes barely dressed.

Imagine being a child and being repeatedly asked to photograph your half-naked mother so she can post a thirst trap.

Or being asked to photograph your father posing with two or three women, seemingly drunk?

The child isn’t simply witnessing the parent’s self-presentation, they’re being recruited into it.

They become the camera operator for an adult’s performance.

And smartphones have made this kind of behaviour incredibly easy.

The camera isn’t merely documenting our lives anymore.

It’s becoming a tool for constructing an image of ourselves, and for making the people around us participate in that construction.

Our partners become supporting actors.

Our children become props.

Strangers become scenery.

And sometimes they become targets.

I was once standing in a queue at a 7-Eleven when a woman took out her phone and secretly photographed an obese person standing in front of her.

She didn’t ask.

She took the photograph, sent it to someone and recorded a voice message.

I have no idea what she said. I don’t need to.

The act itself was enough.

A complete stranger had been reduced to an image that could be passed around for someone else’s amusement.

My wife and I regularly catch people secretly photographing us too.

Not occasionally.

Almost daily.

They point their phones at us, sometimes discreetly and sometimes not very discreetly, trying to take photographs without our consent.

We’re something interesting to capture.

An unusual haircut.

A foreign couple.

A curiosity.

The smartphone has made almost anyone photographable without their knowledge.

You don’t need permission.

You just need a camera.

And because everyone has one, we’ve become increasingly comfortable photographing things we have no right to photograph.

People’s bodies.

People’s children.

People’s private moments.

Strangers who happen to look different.

The camera turns the person into an object.

There was a time when taking a photograph required a decision.

You had a camera.

You had a limited number of exposures.

You saw something.

You decided it was worth capturing.

You took the photograph.

Then you put the camera away and returned to the experience.

The photograph was secondary.

Life came first.

Today, the order has been reversed.

We arrange the experience around the photograph.

We pose.

We retake.

We edit.

We publish.

We wait for reactions.

The photograph is no longer necessarily a record of what happened.

The photograph becomes what happened.

And social media makes the transformation even more obvious.

Look where I am.

Look what I’m doing.

Look how beautiful my life is.

Look how adventurous I am.

Look how happy I am.

Look at the places I’ve been.

Look at the people I’m with.

Look at me.

The landscape becomes a backdrop.

The experience becomes content.

The self becomes the protagonist.

A beautiful building is no longer simply a beautiful building, it’s somewhere to stand in front of.

A beach isn’t simply somewhere to swim, it’s somewhere to photograph yourself.

A foreign city isn’t simply somewhere to wander around, it’s an opportunity to manufacture evidence of an interesting life.

Sometimes people spend more time arranging the photograph than experiencing the thing they supposedly came to experience.

Perhaps this is why modern photography can feel so empty despite the sheer number of photographs we produce.

We’ve never taken so many pictures, yet individual photographs have arguably never meant less.

Our phones contain thousands of them.

Most will never be looked at again.

They’re produced, posted and forgotten.

The photograph that was supposed to preserve the memory has itself become disposable.

And there is something deeply paradoxical about that.

We photograph our lives constantly because we don’t want to forget them.

But by constantly interrupting our lives to photograph them, we’re less present for the very experiences we’re trying to preserve.

We stop looking at the sunset because we’re looking at the screen.

We stop experiencing the walk naturally because someone needs to film it.

We turn an experience into evidence that the experience happened.

And then we call it living.

I don’t think photography itself is the problem.

A photograph can preserve a face after the person is gone. It can preserve a place that no longer exists. It can remind you of a life you once lived.

Photography can be an act of attention.

But there is a fundamental difference between photographing something because you are experiencing it and manufacturing an experience because you want to photograph it.

One begins with life.

The other begins with the image.

Perhaps we need to recover that distinction.

Not everything needs to be photographed.

Not everything needs to be shared.

Not every beautiful moment needs an audience.

And not every moment needs to survive as an image.

Some moments can simply disappear.

The conversation that lasted all night.

The walk where you got completely lost.

The ridiculous thing someone said that made everyone laugh.

The strange little street you stumbled upon.

These moments don’t need proof.

They happened.

It’s enough.

We used to take photographs to remember our lives.

Perhaps we should be careful that we don’t end up living our lives just to have something to photograph.

Thanks for reading.

Teekay