life

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

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

Take back the night

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

June 21, 2026 — Leave a comment

The middle sleep vs capitalism

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

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

You go to bed.

You disappear for 8 hours.

You wake up.

You function.

Then you do it all over again the next night.

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

Wake up at 2 AM?

Problem.

Lie there thinking?

Problem.

Feel awake for a while, then tired again?

Problem.

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

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

I’m not even convinced it’s natural.

Because I’ve lived another kind of sleep.

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

But enough to know there is something real there.

I sleep for 4 or 5 hours.

Then I wake up.

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

I just wake up.

The world is silent.

Everyone else is asleep.

The air feels different.

My mind feels different.

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

And then something opens.

Ideas arrive.

Problems untangle.

Sentences appear.

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

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

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

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

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

And something deeper speaks.

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

So I go back to sleep.

Another few hours.

And somehow, the whole thing feels natural.

Maybe ancient.

Not broken.

Not disordered.

Not like insomnia.

Just ancient.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That detail matters.

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

They ask, “What’s wrong with me?”

That tells us something.

Not only about sleep.

About the society around sleep.

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

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

It sees silence and tries to fill it.

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

This is where sleep becomes political.

Sleep itself is natural.

The modern sleep schedule isn’t.

It belongs to work.

To school.

To office hours.

To alarms.

To productivity culture.

To the economic need to make bodies predictable.

Capitalism colonized our sleep.

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

One block.

One alarm.

One workday.

Repeat.

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

We don’t sleep because the body is sacred.

We sleep so we can function and be productive.

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

We rest so we can return to work less damaged.

Even sleep has been made useful.

Recovery.

Optimization.

Output.

Efficiency.

A better brain.

A better body.

That’s the real sickness.

Not simply lack of sleep.

Not simply insomnia.

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

Nature doesn’t work like that.

Summer is not winter.

December is not June.

The year breathes.

Days stretch and shrink.

Nights lengthen and shorten.

Trees lose their leaves.

Animals slow down.

Light changes.

Energy changes.

Everything adapts except us.

We expect the same output in winter as in summer.

Same wake-up time.

Same productivity.

Same pressure.

Same artificial brightness.

As if the body should be indifferent to the sun.

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

They don’t.

Winter asks for slowness.

Modern economic life asks for output.

Winter gives us longer nights.

We turn on the lights and carry on.

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

Sometimes those words describe something real.

But they can also hide something.

Many people are not failing at rest.

They’re being forced to live against it.

Their rhythm isn’t broken by nature.

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

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

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

Fine.

Some of that can help.

But they rarely talk about capitalism and all it entails.

Stress.

Work.

Poverty.

Grief.

Debt.

Noise.

Fear.

The nervous system living under constant pressure.

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

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

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

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

You’re anxious, so they sell you supplements.

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

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

And the simplest truth is ignored.

Maybe people need less stress.

More time.

More silence.

More prayer.

Work that doesn’t swallow their life.

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

Maybe people don’t need to become better machines.

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

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

A sleep study can measure the brain.

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

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

That room matters.

That middle space matters.

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

During the day, thought is constantly attacked.

Messages.

Screens.

Tasks.

People.

Plans.

Bills.

Responsibilities.

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

But the middle of the night is different.

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

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

The edge of sleep is not empty.

It’s fertile.

Not always useful in the capitalist sense.

But sometimes revealing.

And that is not the same thing.

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

Sometimes it’s stress, illness or pain.

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

But sometimes, it’s something else.

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

The chamber where the ego is quieter.

Where ideas come without being chased.

Then sleep returns.

Not as defeat.

As completion.

First sleep.

A waking.

Second sleep.

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

Maybe that’s what we’ve lost.

The true meaning of sleep.

We reduced it to recovery.

Made it serve productivity.

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

We forgot that sleep is also surrender.

Also mystery.

A borderland.

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

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

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

No matter how many alarms we set.

No matter how many apps we download.

No matter how many experts explain our cycles.

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

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

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

The most human sleep was never a straight line.

It was a tide.

The middle of the night was never the enemy.

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

Resist capitalism, take back your sleep.

Thanks for reading.

Tee.

Lantern by teekay

Note from a sleepless night

May 13, 2026 — Leave a comment

For the first time in a while, I genuinely can’t sleep  

My whole body hurts, in a good way 🙂

Legs super heavy, ankle kinda messed up, toes on my left foot hurt (got stepped on twice in football practice today), ribcage from that knock Friday, plus some hamstring and inner thigh pain.

What I wouldn’t give for a massage right now  

Anyway, I stopped making blog entries like this for a while. No one really wants to read this kinda thing anymore, amirite?

People would rather hear someone yap on video, I get it  

Still, I miss this

And I miss old school blogs in general  

Plus, reading just hits different, you build everything in your head and it feels way more personal and real

I’ve actually read way more this year than I have in the last five combined

I mean books

I’m a big reader overall, I just don’t read books like that, I go on Medium and read random blogs instead

I don’t really do personal stories though, which is probably why I don’t write these either, but I still think there’s a world for it

Even if there aren’t that many people left reading this kind of stuff

I miss Tumblr, I used to spend hours on there  

So many interesting people, so many stories  

And most of them just wrote like this, no structure, no formatting, just thoughts  

There’s comfort in being natural, it makes everything feel more intimate  

I’m rambling  

Pain’s keeping me up, so maybe I’ll just watch Better Call Saul, eat some peanut butter with a couple bananas and wait for the sun

Nights like this I usually don’t sleep until the next evening anyway

Peace and blessing

Duality by Teekay RM

Immigrant kids think in parallel

March 20, 2026 — Leave a comment

We belong here, but we carry somewhere else at the same time.

I didn’t grow up in one place, I grew up across countries, cultures, across versions of life that don’t always overlap. Nothing ever felt fully singular;

Not home
Not language
Not even memory

There’s always another layer running underneath.

A joke that only lands in one country
A smell that brings you back somewhere no one around you knows
A version of you that only exists in a different language

Sometimes it hits you mid-thought. You’re here, but part of you is somewhere else entirely.

Maybe you didn’t move as much, but if you grew up between cultures, you know this feeling.

Because we do learn the world around us
We move through it like anyone else
We understand its rules, its references, its rhythm.

But we also carry something quieter, a parallel world most people don’t see or know about.

It lives in memories that don’t translate
In inside jokes that fall flat outside the circle
In moments that shaped you, but have no place where you are.

And then there’s language.

Some of us speak our parents’ language, some don’t. Some are fluent, some are still finding their way.

Either way, it stays with you

Because language isn’t just words, it’s a way of thinking. You don’t just switch vocabulary, you shift perspective.

Sometimes you even feel it in yourself. Not like you’re becoming someone else, just.. a different version of the same person, expanded.

Every culture has its codes: What’s said, what’s not. What’s allowed, what’s felt but never expressed..

And if you understand more than one, you start to see the world differently.

Then comes the next layer, religion.

Growing up with beliefs and traditions that don’t match the world around you

Again, different rhythms, different priorities and a different way of making sense of life altogther.

You learn what everyone else knows, but you also carry what they don’t: Names, stories, references that exist outside the mainstream.

It’s not always visible, but it shapes how you move.

Living through all of this does something to you. It doesn’t just make you adaptable, it makes you more aware.

You understand what it means to be misunderstood
To feel slightly out of place
To not fully belong

Some embrace it, others struggle with it.

But when you’ve felt that, you don’t want others to feel it too.

Not everyone reflects on it, but those who do soften.

They listen more
They notice more
They hold space differently

Because they’ve lived the distance.

Immigrant kids blend it, and stand out.

We connect things that aren’t supposed to touch
We carry perspectives that don’t usually meet.

We’re rarely the ones drawing lines because we know what it feels like to stand outside them.

Being an immigrant isn’t easy

It comes with friction
With weight
Sometimes with rejection

But it builds something solid

Depth
Awareness
Resilience

You learn to see more
To feel more
To understand more

You don’t just move between worlds

You connect them.

We don’t need to split ourselves to fit in, we don’t need to shrink parts of us to be understood.

We carry multiple worlds
Multiple languages
Multiple ways of being

That’s our wealth.

Let us be.

Thanks for reading.

Teekay

Winter by Tee

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.

Atlantic, by Teekay Rezeau-Merah

Life is a beautiful mystery

July 8, 2025 — Leave a comment

People are oddly mesmerizing.

Sometimes I catch glimpses of conversations, some are deep, others shallow. Both fascinate me. How humans think and function, how they make their own choices, and sometimes, how they lie to themselves.

I like watching people walk together. I can’t help but think of our ancestors, how they moved in groups, hunter-gatherers, until wheat domesticated us (not the other way around). I wish we could go back.

It’s funny how a child’s walking style often matches a parent’s gait, or how the way someone sits says so much about them.

I get stuck watching clothes spin in the dryer. I don’t wear a lot of black (or any, really), so it’s like a rainbow in there. It always reminds me of this Senegalese myth from Ashura Day, where a rainbow means the Prophet’s (PBUH) daughter is doing her laundry. It’s funny, in a sweet way.

Oral traditions must be protected at all costs.

I love the bees and butterflies that hang around when we’re outside. It’s so peaceful.

Fire is mesmerizing. I’ve always been fascinated by it, so much so that, when I was little, one of my experiments went wrong and set my bedroom on fire. Oops! I love bonfires, fireplaces, candles. I used to burn incense just to watch the smoke. I’m also strangely drawn to steam, idk why.

Most people hate spiders. I love them. They really are special, nature’s elite.

Growing things makes no sense. How can a seed feed me with the most beautiful fruit or vegetable in no time? Just soil, water and sun? Endless abundance. Nature is incredible.

The world is full of magic. The stars, clouds, moving patterns, waves, the wind.

Pain is strange. It’s an immediate physical response, but if you think about it, step outside of it, it becomes something else. Just neuroreceptors sending signals. The whole process is wild. I dread pain. It reminds me of death, like it’s the final step before we go.

Skin is interesting. It’s the largest organ we have, yet we treat it like it’s nothing. I’m always amazed when it heals itself, like how? When I was a baby, I had second-degree burns on my face and third-degree burns on my chest. I went blind for a few days. I think about miracles a lot. We abuse our skin constantly, yet it keeps repairing itself.

Languages are mesmerizing. I think about them often. I compare languages in my head and try to understand those who invented them. Again, I think about our ancestors. How did they communicate? What was their humor like? What did they find funny? Did they understand death quickly? How did they distinguish little death (sleep) from big death?

I love the expression “life as we know it”. It plays in my head quite often. My personalities are different in different languages, I think most polyglots can relate.

Life is a beautiful mystery. One day you’re here…

Anyway, thank you for stopping by.

Peace!

Teekay