Reflections

  • The Weight of the Prefix

    My LinkedIn headline currently reads: Technical Product Leader | Payments & Fintech | ex-Nium · ex-AmEx. I haven’t decided how long I’ll keep it that way. Some days it feels like useful context. Other days it feels like I’m leaning on something I should have moved past. I haven’t fully resolved it, which is…

  • The Lies Your Mind Tells You: 10 Thinking Traps That Quietly Steal Your Peace

    There’s a particular kind of suffering that has nothing to do with what’s actually happening to you, and everything to do with what you’re telling yourself about what’s happening. You miss one deadline at work, and within minutes you’re convinced you’re going to be fired, your career is over, and you were never good…

  • What Comparison Does To Us

    There is a particular quality of unhappiness that is generated not by anything that has actually happened to you but by looking at what is happening to someone else. It is a familiar feeling. You are doing reasonably well, by most available measures. And then you encounter evidence of someone who seems to be…

  • The Unpolished Ones

    There is something happening quietly on the internet right now, and it does not have a name yet, which is probably why it has not been ruined yet. It shows up in small moments. A person posts a painting they did over the weekend. The proportions are slightly off. The colours do not match…

  • Slow Reading In A Fast World

    There is a specific kind of pleasure that arrives about thirty pages into a book you have decided to take seriously. The initial friction is gone. The writer’s voice has become familiar. The particular logic of this particular work has started to settle into something you can inhabit rather than merely follow. And then…

  • What The Body Already Knows

    The body is almost always the last thing we listen to, even though it speaks first. Before the mind has fully registered that something is wrong, the body usually already knows. There is a tightness somewhere. A flatness in the energy that does not match the calendar or the caffeine intake. A sleep that…

  • The Myth Of The Self-Made Person

    At some point, the idea of the self-made person became one of the most celebrated stories a culture can tell. The person who started with nothing, who relied on nobody, who through pure will and effort arrived at something significant. It is a powerful story. It is also, in almost every case, not entirely…

  • Artificial Intelligence Is Not Magic. It Is A Mirror.

    When something new and powerful arrives in the world, the first instinct is usually one of two things: either to worship it or to fear it. Both responses share the same flaw. They treat the new thing as though it exists outside of us, as though it arrived from somewhere beyond human hands and…

  • The Quiet Cost Of Always Being Available

    There is a version of you that existed before the smartphone. Before the notification. Before the small red circle on the app icon that told you someone, somewhere, needed a response. That version of you knew what it felt like to be unreachable. To sit in a waiting room with nothing but your thoughts.…

  • Suffering in Advance

    Thinking is one of the most extraordinary capacities humans possess. It allows us to imagine what does not yet exist, trace causes backward and consequences forward, build systems, diagnose failures, and make meaning out of chaos. Entire civilisations rest on it. So do sciences, institutions, and families. And yet the same faculty that enables…