What happened (This Year)?

/ year in review /

I look back on this year as heavy and often off-course—an unfinished PhD, money stress, burnout from giving too much, and habits that kept tripping me up. I didn’t meet most of the goals I set, and that was painful to face. But the year also pushed me to strip things down: I stepped away from work that drained me, let go of a lot of what I owned, got my finances under control, and leaned into music and study as daily lifelines. There’s bitterness in how much energy and time slipped away, but also something steady that held—being there for people I love, writing and composing, facing conflict more honestly, and slowly reacting less to the noise. I end the year without a win to celebrate, but with a clearer sense of what matters and the resolve to keep going, lighter and more hopeful than before.

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Morning Catastrophizing

/ creativity, higher thought, journal, perceptions, reality, thought /

A bleak morning reflection on waking with crushing dread and catastrophic thoughts, and the slow, deliberate effort to confront them — recognizing that these fears are just unproven futures, products of a lifelong negativity bias. Choosing to challenge them, strip them of authority, and begin the day with cautious, deliberate resistance against the mind’s darker tendencies.

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Don’t Look Up

/ creativity, higher thought, mentorship /

I keep catching myself staring at the mountain ahead, feeling like I’m already too late to climb it. That feeling has followed me for years, especially with music. At 32, I still think about the decade I didn’t listen to the voice telling me to start, and how fear smothered it. Even now, after months of studying and creating, I still feel behind—like there’s a clock ticking somewhere, reminding me how much time I burned. But living in that mindset is its own trap. It lets the quieter voice of sloth and fear keep winning until you wake up one day realizing you never chased the thing that mattered. So I’m trying to stop looking up at the impossible climb and just move, even if it’s slow. Strip away the distractions, the excuses, the pointless ways we waste what little time we have. Be patient. Stay focused. And don’t stop.

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A Fixed-Point Life

/ consumption, higher thought, love, reality and programming, thought /

There are two ways we grow: by adding what we need or by removing what we don’t—and knowing which to use can reshape how we learn, build wealth, or find fulfillment. Drawing from the idea of fixed points in computer science, this article uses the metaphor of filling a basket with apples to illustrate how we either start empty and gather carefully (least fixed point) or start full and discard what’s unneeded (greatest fixed point). We learn songs by starting with nothing and practicing until we master them. We find love, peace, or ego-loss by starting with openness and subtracting what harms. Even life itself follows this arc: we grow through accumulation, then decay by shedding. The trap is trying to chase satisfaction by endless addition, when sometimes clarity and freedom come from subtraction. Whether it’s learning, earning, or letting go, the path you choose—build up or strip away—makes all the difference.

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Welcome to Love

/ higher thought, love, parenting /

Some parents believe that providing food and shelter (sustenance) is enough to earn respect, but this bare minimum can mask a deeper failure to love. When children push back against this faulty reasoning, it’s not rebellion but a reflection of years of emotional starvation—a revenant arrow returning to the one who launched it. Like a business man does not blame his business for its own bankruptcy, a child cannot be blamed for withering under poor nourishment, even if resources were spent. Love is not a luxury—it is the crucial nutrient without which all other efforts are simply diminished in their effectiveness. I’ve witnessed many brilliant, young, and talented individual destroyed not by the world, but by those who claimed to raise them. There is no honor in producing survivors. And often, the parent, having refused to listen, dies alone—convinced they were right.

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Petal’s Cosmic Bouquet

/ consciousness, consumption, higher thought, layers of reality, perceptions, reality /

As Petal sets out to bring comfort to her dying grandfather, a simple bouquet leads her through a series of profound encounters that quietly unravel her understanding of happiness, beauty, and reality itself. A gentle, thought-provoking story about the hidden forces behind our emotions and the surprising places truth can bloom.

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“Play the Game, Stay Hungry”: Endless Dissatisfaction

/ consumption, higher thought /

“Stay hungry,” they say—but hunger is a cycle; an insatiable loop. You feed it, only for it to return. In the corporate world, this hunger is rebranded as virtue—more gain, more status, more recognition. But like physical hunger, it is ceaseless. When you see life as an endless chase, you become unending dissatisfaction. Read this article for a reflection on this paradoxical aphorism, as we take a deeper look at their underlying assumptions.

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Time Managing

/ consumption, objects, perceptions, reality, thought /

Time slips through your fingers, wasted on the endless cycle of acquiring, maintaining, and securing objects. Each of them, whether a piece of technology or a simple household object, requires time managing it. You buy, you use, you clean, you fix—always with the nagging fear of losing or breaking what you’ve worked to gain. This cycle consumes hours, making you forget that time, like everything else, is fleeting. The more you own, the more time you spend managing. And yet, none of it lasts. You are not in control, but rather caught in the web of your own desires, gradually realizing that the objects you cling to only rob you of the very thing you value most: time itself.

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Kandersteg, Switzerland: Emerald Heaven

/ hiking, journal, travel /

A week in the Swiss Alps was a whirlwind of breathtaking beauty and unexpected anxieties. In this article you’ll find the most stunning photos I’ve taken to date, and would well satisfy you without reading a single word. Hiking through stunning landscapes like Oeschinensee and the challenging Jegertosse-Fisialp pushed me to my limits, both physical and mental. The tranquility of the mountains was often interrupted by the absurdity of human behavior, from the man who shamed his friend for not swimming to the unsettling realization of my own anxieties and weight of my current circumstances. Despite these moments of darkness, the sheer beauty of Switzerland and the kindness of strangers offered fleeting moments of grace, leaving me with a bittersweet longing for a simpler, more fulfilling life true to my innate nature.

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