Europe: Walking Toward the Unwritten Horizon

ChatGPT Image Dec 8, 2025, 07_20_54 PM

Europe is very easy to insult.

From a certain angle, the continent looks like an aging museum with Wi-Fi: polite, overregulated, uncomfortable with power, lost in its own procedures while other players move faster and hit harder. If you lived here in the 1970s and come back now, the contrast feels almost obscene. Where once your memory stored quiet town squares and local accents, now it finds the familiar … Read the rest

The Cult of Work and the Forgotten Art of Rest

ChatGPT Image Nov 10, 2025, 07_08_07 PM

Work, in the long view, is a moving target. For most of our species’ history we did not “have jobs”; we had tasks that followed daylight, seasons, and stomachs. Hunter-gatherer life combined bursts of high effort with long stretches of social time—mending, storytelling, tool care, childcare. Ethnographic estimates vary, but the pattern is consistent: subsistence came in pulses, not in 8-hour rectangles. The body we still carry—ultradian focus cycles, circadian … Read the rest

The Narrow Road to the Far North

Content advisory 16+ I was having a spirited conversation today, early, with a really bright man — he was frying breakfast eggs while talking with me on Skype (the ONLY way to eat breakfast !) — about the best way to go about living one’s life.

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Of course, the thing about this very bright man (aged 47 and me — a stout 69 as of today, 8 May–) is that … Read the rest

On The Subject Of Taxis

Контент 18+ Taxis and taxi drivers are among the things in life that I generally hate. Which does not mean that I lump them together as a single evil force or that I would cast them, one and all, in a concentration camp if I could. As in all walks of life, the odd Good Samaritan may pop up in one of those meter-machines, plenty of decent sorts are just … Read the rest