It has been quiet for quite a while since I started experimenting with writing and email distribution in 2023. New topics and projects came into my life that took priority over my writing habit. Upon sifting through the archives, I realized there are a few gems in there, and it would be a pity to give them up and let everything die silently.

I’ve been working behind the scenes, and today I’m relaunching this publication alongside my new website (feel free to check it out). New backend, new architecture, new style, new design.

To provide you with a refined reading experience, sharper essays, and a more reliable platform, Sunday Sparks has officially transitioned from Ghost to Substack.

What this means for you:

• New Web Address: The publication no longer lives on my main domain, but has its own dedicated home over at getsundaysparks.substack.com.

• No Action Required: Nothing changes routine-wise. You will continue to receive new essays directly via email without having to re-subscribe or adjust any settings.

• Optional Features: For certain features such as commenting, chatting, receiving notes and other updates, or interacting with the community, you might want to log in or create a Substack account. Substack also offers a convenient app if you enjoy exploring other publications.

As part of the transition, this publication now operates under Substack’s terms of service and privacy policy. This simply means your email address (and name, if provided) has been securely transferred to continue delivering the newsletter. As always, you can unsubscribe at any time using the link at the bottom of any email.

What’s new:

As part of this relaunch, I’m currently importing overhauled and sharpened foundational essays (and trashing some of the borderline embarrassing gibberish). Some pieces are receiving a substantial rewrite; those I will re-release in the normal Sunday rhythm.

Check out the brand new interface—it looks pretty dope:

Sunday Sparks

Business consultant by trade, philosopher at heart, exploring freedom, social dynamics, and healthy masculine identity for independent thinkers.

By Ferdinand Kutschker

See you in your inbox.

Best regards,

Ferdinand

P.S. New releases will be delivered from a new email address (getsundaysparks@substack.com), so your email client might not know how to classify them yet. To ensure future essays don’t get lost in the spam or promotions tab, add this address to your contacts or drag this email to your primary inbox.

Everybody is constantly waiting for something. You go on a date and wait for the other person to arrive. You sit on a train and wait to reach your destination. You work a corporate job and wait for a promotion. You wait for a parcel, you wait for the weekend, you wait for a holiday, you wait for love. For many people, life degenerates into an endless sequence of passive waiting intervals.

Stop waiting.

If someone is late for a meeting, read a few pages of a book, organize your thoughts, go through your todo list and complete a few simple tasks, write in your journal, brainstorm a topic, go through your read later list, or simply observe your surroundings, appreciate the solitude, and enjoy the sensation of the wind on your skin or the sound of the birds singing—in other words, being alive.

You might have heard something like “I’ve been waiting for you for over fifteen minutes.” Well, why did they wait and surrender control of those fifteen minutes instead of making use of them?

This doesn’t imply you should cultivate being late or encourage others to be late. It would show little appreciation for their time, even if they might waste it on social media anyway. But those who value their time highly would swiftly draw a line. Lateness is usually a reflection of poor time management, unexamined priorities, or a lack of respect for commitments. But regardless of why the other person is late, you should never bind your state of mind to their poor choices or lack of skill. If their behavior breaches your boundaries, draw the necessary consequences.

Until then, make proper use of your time instead of waiting for it to pass.

Personal and Professional Environments

Your parcel arrives late, the flight is delayed, your food takes an hour to arrive—your frustration changes nothing. Yes, these delays can impact your schedule anywhere from mild to cataclysmic. But how you react to them is entirely your choice.

Waiting is the default state of the passive consumer. It means ceding your agency to an external person or event. The object of your expectation may arrive late, arrive broken, or never arrive at all. It is entirely outside your control.

The same rule applies to your professional life. If a client, colleague, or service provider is late, sitting in frustration does not solve the bottleneck; it merely drains your focus. Use the delay to your advantage. Clear your inbox, outline a concept, review your calendar, knock out a few of those quick calls, or do some physical mobility exercises. Business delays require business solutions—optimizing processes, shifting workloads, or changing staff and suppliers—not emotional suffering.

How to Reclaim Your Time

Start with adopting a fresh mental framework regarding responsibility. Time is your only non-renewable asset, vastly outvaluing money or material property. This is why perceived wasted time often triggers intense anger. Ask yourself: Who is responsible for your time and its management?

You alone are responsible for how you allocate your resources, including your attention. If you are stuck in a two-hour traffic jam, summoning the darkest human fantasies of castigation and destruction, ruining your mood and focus for the rest of the day, recognize that this reaction is a poor and immature choice. Who is truly the one wasting your time? Is it the driver who caused the accident two kilometers ahead, or is it you who took that specific car on that specific road at that specific hour, and are choosing fury over focus?

Instead of raging at factors outside your control, claim the time. Listen to an audiobook, engage in a meaningful conversation with your passenger, or simply enjoy the ride in your vehicle which you have been working and saving for years to afford.

Next, erase the word “waiting” from your vocabulary and replace it with “wasting.” Admit to yourself that you have never been waiting for time to pass but were wasting it.

Lastly, tweak your environment so that making better choices about the use of your time requires less effort. Take your current book wherever you go. Get a tablet or eReader. Make sure audiobooks or podcasts are downloaded on your phone and bring headphones. Keep a notebook and writing tools at hand. Learn a few simple physical or mental exercises like stretching, breathwork, meditation, or somatic awareness, that require zero equipment. There are thousands of other things scattered empty time slots can be productively used for; a couple are most likely bubbling up in your head right now.

Stop wasting your time and blaming it on external circumstances. Make use of it.

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If we let someone else make a decision for us and it turns out not to be beneficial, we typically feel upset, abused, cheated or infuriated. If we make a conscious decision, based either on a comprehensive assessment of the situation and all its potential options, scenarios, and consequences or simply our intuitive gut feeling and it turns out to be a failure, we might experience similar feelings but are far better equipped to process the outcome. Often we don’t even perceive the experience as detrimental and are rather content with it.

The difference is that in the latter scenario, we own our decision and accept responsibility for its consequences because we aligned it with our own moral standards that we can actually afford, whereas in the first scenario, we give our power away and surrender to someone else’s moral standards.

For the purpose of this essay, morality means the system of principles—derived from culture, religion, philosophy, ideology, or personal conviction—by which we judge intentions and actions as right or wrong.

Bearing Morality’s Costs

Every decision is ultimately a moral trade-off, evaluated against our individual resources. Our integrity, trustworthiness, assertiveness, self-confidence, emotional stability, and even survival depend on whether we have chosen moral standards we can afford.

If the costs of resources for moral standards are collectivized, for instance through some form of social cost splitting or redistribution of assets, everyone can afford any moral standard, no matter whether it is reasonable or not.

The moment you subscribe to such societal standards you’re being stripped of your integrity. Why? Because you raise your moral standards as soon as the burden of their directly related costs seemingly disappears. In that very instant you give up your freedom and become dependent on the collectivizing system to uphold an inflated morality whose costs you individually cannot afford.

Moral standards also represent an essential aspect of our belief system and self-perception. People internalize these external standards, which then become an integral part of their identity. If you have adopted a certain morality whose costs you can’t bear—which was only made possible by entering a collectivizing entity—your identity becomes contingent upon the continued existence of the system that provides the cost splitting.

Moral Marginal Decisions

A marginal decision evaluates the incremental cost and benefit of one additional unit of a good. Having one perfectly chilled beer after a hard day of work feels phenomenal but the fifth already loses its appeal. A moral marginal decision works the same way: every additional virtue you demand carries an incremental cost that must be paid for with concrete human or financial capital, manifesting as a trade-off decision.

When a state enforces systemic lockdowns that deprive an entire generation of children of a year of education and social development to marginally extend the life expectancy of the elderly and sick, it shifts the moral costs from those who benefit to those who have no say.

In a demographically healthy non-collectivistic society this would be an unreasonable intergenerational trade-off for any family. But in a society that collectivizes its human capital production—aka family and children—people who consume their energy and resources without offspring effectively leech off people who invested it in the upbringing of children, creating a dramatic cannibalistic social effect.

Of course, anyone is free to adopt this moral standard, as long as they’re willing and capable of bearing its costs individually. If an elder wants to prolong his life using his own resources or if any relative is willing to do so instead of investing those resources in the upbringing of their children or at the expense of their own offspring’s education, this is perfectly fine. After all, it is a direct expression of free will. However, they have to bear the consequences of this moral consideration.

Thus, the limitations of moral bandwidth are naturally one’s own resources. If these limitations are terminated for the individual through cost-collectivization, the consideration process degenerates and society starts making decisions with catastrophic cost-benefit ratios—outcomes no single individual would ever pay for out of their own pocket.

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Manifestations of Morality’s Costs

Heath Ledger aka The Joker in The Dark Knight brings it to the point:

Their morals, their code … it’s a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. You’ll see—I’ll show you ... when the chips are down, these civilized people … they’ll eat each other. See, I’m not a monster … I’m just ahead of the curve.

He is pointing at the exact mechanism that people adopt moral standards they can’t truly afford. The entity that allows them to have these raised morals and codes is the collectivizing system they’ve become dependent of.

This hypocrisy of outsourced morality comes in many different forms. It is always easy to brag about morality when someone else pays the bill:

• It’s easy to argue that university education should be free for everyone when the costs are distributed across taxpayers regardless of whether they ever attended university themselves.

• It’s easy to eat cheap chicken bought in the supermarket if you don’t have to raise the animal under devastating low-cost conditions and slaughter it yourself.

• It’s easy to advocate for a government vaccination program if it grants your children the right to go to school and yourself the right to travel.

• It’s easy to demand aggressive military interventions in foreign conflicts and hostility against other nations when you don’t have to fight in the war yourself or offer personal living space for refugees.

• It’s easy to be pro-abortion if you don’t have to pay for the procedure, nor perform it yourself, and on top of that avoid bearing the financial or emotional weight of raising the child.

• It’s easy to not exercise at all, get drunk weekly, smoke, and binge on junk food if public health insurance pays for treatment of any ailment you might develop.

• It’s easy to advocate for women’s, children’s, and other social groups’ rights if this grants you state-enforced privileges such as quota in companies and universities, divorce bonuses, and other financial benefits, when you bear no personal liability for the resulting decline of families and institutions.

• It’s easy to advocate for the restriction of CO2 emissions and actions to combat climate change as long as you don’t have to turn off your own heating, TV, or favorite online shopping site or stop eating imported avocado, driving to work with motorized vehicles, or going on vacation in Italy, the Caribbean or Thailand.

• Historically, it was easy for citizens of the Roman Empire to demand free grain and spectacles if it was funded by the violent plundering of distant provinces.

• Historically, it was easy for the Victorian elite to frame British imperialism as a noble ‘civilizing mission’ as long as its astronomical economic and human costs and the drug crises it induced were outsourced to colonies like India and China.

• Historically, it was easy to advocate for the expropriation of Jews in 1930s Germany if that secured your job, funded the new highways, and spared you from personally knocking on your neighbor’s door claiming their possessions.

What people don’t realize is that they indeed bear the costs for their adopted moral standards. Collectivization doesn’t mean that morality becomes free or its costs miraculously disappear. It’s like buying a flatscreen TV in four easy installments. The act of purchase is easy but the burden is heavy. You pay for your morals. Always.

It comes in the form of lowered standards in education and infrastructure, of shortages of teachers and other skilled labor. It comes in the form of declining levels of inner security and inflation of currency. It comes in the form of increasing prices of consumer goods, rising taxes, and new fees. It comes in the form of rising stress levels and less capacity for genuine rest and recreation. And it comes in the form of limitations on freedom and restriction of formerly granted rights.

Breaking the Chains of Collectivized Costs

Any moral standard needs to be cultivated on the level of the individual. Don’t adopt any moral standard you’re not willing to pay for; it is an attribute of a slave’s mind. If you want to maintain sovereignty over your life, you have to make a full assessment of your morality, its (hypothetical) individual costs, and whether or not you are able and willing to bear these costs.

Collectivizing the costs of morality is a business model in itself. Since the true price of an artificially raised moral standard initially remains invisible on the individual level, the bill is handed to you later through opaque state mechanisms.

To break free from this trap, you must perform an audit of your own moral inventory:

1. Map Your Moral Inventory: If this is the first time you reflect on this topic, chances are high you don’t know what your beliefs and standards are. Take a piece of paper, title it “My Moral Principles & Beliefs,” and jot down every major ethical stance you hold regarding society, lifestyle, politics, and consumption. Think contemporary topics of public discussion, such as family law, foreign military interventions, or public health mandates. You might end up with a surprisingly long list.

2. Separate Subsidized Virtues from Personal Convictions: At first, they might be hard to distinguish.
   Subsidized Virtues (items with collectivized costs) are beliefs and standards heavily promoted by mainstream institutions, easily accessible and summarized in simple slogans and thin narratives, highly polarizing, and culturally rewarded. They typically demand that others or society as a whole change its behavior while shielding you from immediate personal trade-offs. Adopting a certain stance is often being rewarded with specific benefits over others who resist the narrative. Sometimes, non-adoption is even punished, if the collectivizing entity has the power and means to do so.
   Personal Convictions (items without collectivized costs) are principles directly related to your own behavior. They require personal discipline, carry social risk or effort, and apply strictly to how you conduct yourself regardless of public opinion.

3. Perform the Cost Test: For every major principle on your list, ask yourself one question: “If the collective safety net and its artificial incentives—both systemic subsidies and social rewards—disappeared tomorrow and I had to bear 100% of the financial, social, emotional, energetic, and physical consequences of this stance out of my own pocket, would I still hold it?”

4. Decide: Either accept the full personal cost of your stance and integrate it into your daily actions, or drop the moral posture entirely.

This small exercise is not about adopting cynicism, but eliminating hypocrisy. It forces you to realize where your convictions are genuine and where you are simply playing a role funded by other people’s resources.

True integrity means to pay the price for the morality you apply to yourself and others out of your own pocket. Only this makes you a sovereign individual.

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When it comes to creating businesses or building any significant professional or personal skill, it seems that some people are highly efficient and successful whereas others barely move from point A to point B on their self-proclaimed journey.

One of the main differentiators between these two groups of people is the type of information they habitually process on a daily basis. Information can either transform into knowledge and ultimately generate insight to fuel deliberate choices of action, or it withers, expires, and is discarded.

No matter which of these pathways information takes on its way of being processed by our minds, the time invested to acquire information of either category is fairly similar. So when it comes to generating knowledge and insight, the key lies in making an effort to choose the right type of information.

Expiring Information

The vast majority of people make poor choices regarding the type of information they take in. They consume information rather than invest in it.

Maybe you stumble over an inspiring quote on Instagram, a valuable thought on Twitter, or a dialogue in a movie that sparks your interest. If you don’t work with it either through elaborate thinking, writing, or other means of processing, or by letting it guide you to more elaborate reads, it soon will be dismissed by the next snippet of information that demands your attention. You get the impression you created knowledge or even insight. But this is a delusion. The period of exposure to your senses is simply not long enough and the processing time required for the mind to integrate the information after the exposure is pretty much nonexistent.

The truth is that most forms of informational media rely on your consumptive behavior. That you forget information quickly after intake so you feel the need to come back to the same source to receive the same kind of information over and over again, sometimes slightly modified but often in the exact same format. You don’t notice because the information continuously expires.

Any form of expiring information is purposefully designed to be consumed easily.

News and other short formats of information found in media such as television, streaming services, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and the like—which often parade as ‘education’—are designed to invoke a craving cycle of variable reward schedules, novelty, and emotional outrage. As far as these ever contain information of value it comes in the form of infotainment at best. Even if you have the impression you just learned something valuable there are a few issues:

1. The duration of sensory engagement with the piece of information is minimal and far too brief for cognitive consolidation. For reflection to occur, your brain requires exposure time with focused engagement followed by a period of withdrawal and integration.

2. Expiring information suffers from drastic context collapse. Content snippets are stripped of their structural framework, leaving the consumer with isolated claims rather than coherent chains of thought.

3. Pieces of expiring information are designed to be emotional, colorful, luring, attention-grabbing, and fast-paced, to bypass filter mechanisms and address the subconscious aspects of the mind, and are therefore not supportive of digesting information consciously. Knowledge is derived from information through the act of thinking, which is the development of concepts and ideas that can be applied in the real world.

Modern media feeds, even those of credible journalists and news formats, operate on algorithmic incentives optimized purely for retention and emotional arousal. Does that mean you can’t use such sources of information? You can. But you need to discipline yourself and consciously create the space and time for proper sensory exposure and mental reflection as well as develop a high level of awareness of the emotional bias.

A book will generally provide a better surface for systematic note-taking and highlighting as well as pausing, thinking, and recalling. Almost all information dispersed through media of the mainstream is derived from more substantial and elaborate forms of recorded knowledge. Mainstream media, especially in its socialized manifestations of Instagram and TikTok, is not designed to expand to the depths of larger concepts like books do, simply because there’s not enough space on the screen of your phone and not enough time before the next post demands your attention.

How about the news? It suffers from the same issues described above. Whether or not you should take in news depends on your profession and personal interests. News should generally be regarded as recurring examples—temporary snapshots—of bigger concepts and historical dynamics. These bigger concepts can only be understood by accumulating knowledge through compounding information; or in other words: by studying books about history, psychology, theology, politics, sociology, geography, and the like. If you need to stay on top of the recent news because your profession demands it, go for it. Otherwise, if consumed at all, news should be treated as complementary snippets of information in addition to a strong foundation of compounding, knowledge-generating information. In general, time is much wiser invested in grasping the underlying dynamics and fundamental rules than taking a consumptive glance at their symptoms.

How to spot expiring information:

• Expiring information is attractive. It’s visually appealing, comes with a soundtrack, and triggers your reward mechanisms. Sometimes it’s amusing and sometimes it’s serious; but it is always entertaining and never constitutes structured knowledge.

• Expiring information lacks detail, nuance, and perspective. It conveys simple messages that don’t require thinking. It commonly tells you what happened but not the reasons and dependencies why it happened or the general conditions under which it might happen again.

• Expiring information is easily digestible and requires little to no effort to attain. It follows your favorite TV show at 8:00 PM and pops up on your phone as a push notification.

• Expiring information tends to severely lack any rigorous scientific standards. It relies heavily on speculation, assumption, oversimplification, and secondary accounts without providing verifiable sources. While it is difficult to find any credible study on this topic—likely due to its enormous complexity—it should be fairly safe to assume that a substantial portion of daily media coverage and factual claims in mass communication is incomplete, context-stripped, outdated, exaggerated or outright misleading.

• Expiring information is outrage-driven and emotional. It relies on moral indignation, fear, or urgency to hijack your attention mechanism.

• Expiring information won’t be relevant in a week, a month, or a year from now.

• Expiring information is marketed to you.

More of this type of information just creates more stress and confusion and continues to erode your sense of orientation and purpose. Like a labyrinth whose paths you don’t know and whose exit you can’t find because its walls seem to constantly shift places. If treated properly, on the other hand, information can turn into knowledge which allows you to draw insight.

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Compounding Information

Warren Buffett is certainly one of the most iconic idols in the world of finance. The way he treats information is typical of people who build successful businesses. Here’s a snippet from The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder:

Starting [at a young age] he’s read everything that he could find about business. The subject that interests him, he’s read newspapers, biographies, trade press. He went over to his grandfather who was a grocer and he read the progressive grocer magazine, and he read articles on how to stock a meat department. He’s gone to visit every company that he could find that was even slightly interesting to him, he went down to visit a barrel maker and spent hours talking about how to make barrels. He went to American Express, and he spent hours talking about that business, he went to GEICO and learned about the insurance business. He has stacks of reports on his desk from the companies he owns, pig stalls, jewelry, boat winches, everything you can imagine. He reads hundreds of annual reports every year from companies that he doesn’t own yet, because he just wants to understand their businesses, and then when the opportunity arises, then he’s ready and he can make a decision. What he’s really done is he’s created this immense vertical filing cabinet in his brain of layers and layers and layers of files of information that he can draw back on now for more than 70 years worth of data.

Take a moment to reflect on Warren Buffett’s approach. In which way is it different from other people’s habit of consuming expiring information?

To compound information you need to invest in it rather than consume it. As it goes for anything material that is worth possessing, knowledge and insight are created by acts of investment. This investment comes in the form of dedication, time, commitment, discipline, patience, focus, and energy. At times it comes in the form of money, although money rarely is the bottleneck to gathering information. How ironic that, of all things, we use a lack of money as our favorite excuse to avoid making a real investment.

Compounding means piling up processed information for it to connect, leverage, and create solid building blocks for the heavy brick walls of your house of knowledge. Information suitable for compounding cannot be easily digestible by definition. Because the development of knowledge and insight requires the creation of neuronal pathways. It requires working with the mind, which is inherently exhausting.

Otherwise, everybody would be knowledgeable. Wisdom ultimately emerges from the culmination of accumulated insight. Does everybody automatically become wise? Of course not. Very few do, as a result of lifelong disciplined dedication; and we seek their wisdom for guidance. Just keep in mind that although popular proverbs imply that wisdom comes with age, time represents just one variable in the equation.

Your Path to Wisdom

In the case of Warren Buffett the core discipline is financial literacy. The majority of his informational intake is categorized under business and finance and aims to describe universal patterns and practices that expire slowly, if at all. On top of that, the type of information already is of high quality and he takes the time to process the input. Thinking and learning about business is his intrinsic interest.

If you want to become knowledgeable or even go beyond insight to create wisdom, you must filter your intake and pick information that meets the following criteria:

1. The information complements similar or categorically related disciplines. Although all kinds of knowledge from all imaginable categories ultimately complement each other, you will create dramatic leverage by adjusting your input filter for a certain set of categories or topics. Information about how to cultivate rice fields properly will ultimately complement the information about writing and embedding HTML code on websites, but it may not leverage short term. Limit and filter mainstream media. Pick your categories.

2. The information compounds because it is not subject to expiration or expires slowly. Planet Earth circles the Sun and together with other planets and cosmic objects, Sun and Earth form the solar system, which itself circles an even larger massive object, a black hole. The sum of solar systems and cosmic objects circling that black hole form a galaxy, which we call the Milky Way. This information will most likely remain a more or less accurate description of our shared reality for a long time. The name of Kylie Jenner’s current boyfriend might not.

3. The information is of high quality. It is detailed, utilizes scientific concepts, and can be traced to its origins. It offers different perspectives, and allows discussion. It educates you about underlying principles and rules that are universal and observable or verifiable instead of stringing together series of apodictic statements. Ideologically biased or dogmatic texts can still be valuable for understanding specific viewpoints, provided you remain aware of their inherent limitations. Pick books, essays, letters, articles, or recordings of people who are successful according to your individual definition of success. Skip mindless scrolling through tiny snippets of information on social media platforms from anonymous accounts or influencers lacking real-world competence. However, social media can be an incredible source of inspiration that directs you to sources of elaborate, high-quality information.

4. The information is being processed through reflection and thought. This means you need to create mental space and silence to form opinions and ideas. This way you learn to understand what others are missing. Operationally you do that by recording your thoughts in written text in a notebook, by sketching, drawing, or otherwise transmuting your thoughts into art through painting or composing music. Any form that is suitable to reflect your collected thoughts back to you to spark further thought. If you organize your knowledge using computer systems or other forms of a so-called “second brain”, make sure that you don’t fall into the trap of just storing the information away without processing it with your mind. Constantly relying on an external library to retrieve information doesn’t lead to wisdom.

Start choosing your information instead of it being chosen for you. Stop letting expiring information enslave your mind. Start compounding.

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The exploration of interdependencies between the mind and body is one of the most mysterious fields of human scientific endeavor. It’s one of the topics that has been concerning mankind for thousands of years.

A quick search on the internet produces an innumerable amount of philosophical, spiritual, religious, and scientific models that seek to explain something termed the mind-body connection. Contemporary healthcare practices and mainstream science tend to both study and treat the mind and the body as two separate entities. Conventional institutions of education and media advocate this dualism in a similar fashion.

The Fraudulent Segregation of Your Body and Mind

Contemporary science tends to treat mind and body as two separate entities, ostensibly in the attempt to better understand their specificities. This deludes us from the ever so simple and obvious truth: Mind and body naturally form a union. A complex symbiotic construct with elaborate interdependencies that shall not be separated or divided into contradicting concepts if one desires to maintain sanity.

The larger part of the humanly constructed world is specifically designed to separate your body from your mind. It is a huge societal fraud that comes under the guise of repetitive, short-term means of satisfaction and discomfort and is being carefully curated to eventually form patterns of addiction and aversion with just one objective: to hold you in a state of subtle underlying fear, shame, and guilt to break your free will and efficiently exploit your time and life energy. An insidious form of usurpation.

It disturbs your ability to distinguish between real healthy nourishing food and artificial empty substitutes. It numbs your experience of real intimate connection. It leads you to confuse short-term self-destructive behavior with the pursuit of productive and sustainable long-term goals.

Most of the people and institutions maintaining the systems we live in are oblivious to the consequences of their actions as cogs in the machinery. This subtle state of fear, shame, or guilt has become the constant underlying background noise of their lives and the main driver of their actions—actions that originate primarily from fear, not from love.

If you take a step back, observe carefully, and pay attention, you can see it. In the posture of your tax advisor who’s opted for studies that promised security, working 60 hours per week in an air-conditioned office, financing a big house he effectively never uses, being espoused to a wife he’s barely intimate with, and having an only child that is being bullied in school and he rarely spends time with. In the strenuous but clumsy gesticulating of your colleague at work, occupying the desk directly opposite with the big cookie jar and the generous stash of 1.5-liter coke bottles, whose life seems to be a sheer perpetuity of unpleasant events. And in the eyes of the cashier with the thin hair and chapped hands at your local grocery store who never speaks and only mutters the final sum payable cash or by card.

This systematic exploitation through fear can easily be exposed by contemplating the following simple questions and asking yourself whether your true motivation is passion, joy, and love, or whether it is some manifestation of fear:

• Why do you do the work you do?

• Why do you live where you live?

• Why do you pursue the hobbies you have?

• Why do you pursue the friendships you have?

• Why do you spend your money the way you do?

• Why do you consume alcohol, cigarettes, sugar, pornography, coffee, junk food, social media, prostitutes, beauty products, TV shows, so-called “hard drugs” or anything else you’d personally classify as addictive?

• Why are you with your partner?

The aforementioned exploitation relies heavily on the segregation of body and mind. Higher levels of somatic awareness on the other hand increase interoception (awareness of internal bodily signals) and reduce vulnerability to manipulation or emotional hijacking—the extraordinary resilience against exploitation we’re looking for. When the feedback loop between sensory bodily experience and mental interpretation is instantaneous and clear, societal conditioning will have a hard time to interpose itself.

In your pursuit of freedom, re-establishing unity between body and mind—’connecting with your body’—represents the foundational prerequisite. It unlocks the emotional resilience and clarity of choice required to navigate an interdependent world with real sovereignty.

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Your Body Speaks the Truth

All conscious and unconscious thought patterns eventually manifest in the body. Your conscious expression—such as through language—is always just a reflection of the conscious aspect of your mind. We don’t consciously express its unconscious aspects because we’re oblivious to them.

But our bodies do. Our bodies always tell the truth, even when we’re oblivious to our unconscious mental interpretation of the bodily experience.

Your body expresses when you’re tense, when you’re stressed, or feel unpleasant sensations. Your body expresses when you lie, cheat, or betray. And your body expresses when you are happy and joyful.

Your body always manifests the truth of the present moment—even stores it if not expressed and processed—no matter whether you are aware of it or not. Your physical form embodies both your conscious and your unconscious mental patterns.

If you re-establish unity between these two segregated instances you gain access to the wisdom of your body, meaning the subtleties of your bodily sensory experiences as well as the physical manifestation of your unconscious mind. All of a sudden the unconscious becomes conscious.

Reconnect to Your Body

To heal the friction and segregation and to reunite your body and mind you need to practice two things:

1. Creating space for physical sensations and emotional patterns to be expressed and experienced without judgment, allowing internal friction to naturally dissolve.

2. Equanimity regarding the quality of your ever-changing physical sensory experience.

There is a plethora of practices that help you to reconnect to your body, to reintegrate your body and mind, all of which represent lifestyle choices. That means there’s no one-time pill you can swallow or a weekend treatment you can book. This process of integration is a continuous practice and path you must choose to walk.

Here’s a list of proven practices that tackle the integration of mind and body from different angles. Due to our very individual life experiences and conditioning, you will find that one practice serves you more than the other. Try for yourself and find what works for you.

• Meditation: Broad range of disciplines designed to raise conscious awareness, train intentional focus, and observe internal experience. Depending on the technique, practices may cultivate equanimity, single-pointed concentration, or unconditional goodwill.

• Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT): A form of psychotherapy that incorporates mindfulness practices like present moment awareness, meditation, breathing, and body scan exercises.

• Hypnotherapy: Practice to induce a deeply relaxed physical state for the subconscious mind to be able to more readily accept suggestions to change involuntary responses.

• Body Psychotherapy: A branch of psychotherapy that incorporates touch, breathing, and movement techniques to address a wide range of mental and physical health conditions.

• Somatic Experiencing (SE): Practice that brings awareness to physical sensations and reactions associated with traumatic experiences to integrate unconscious memories.

• Tension And Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE): Practice to evoke natural tremor responses in the body to release tension associated with stress or trauma.

• Yoga: Discipline that comes in many flavors and facets aiming to integrate body, mind, and spirit through physical movement, breathing techniques, and meditation. My favorites are Hot (Bikram) and Yin Yoga.

• Dance Movement Therapy (DMT): Practice to create awareness for behavior patterns through exploration of sensations, emotions, and mental patterns emerging from the movement.

• Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PMR): Practice of gradual contraction and relaxation of muscle groups to reduce physical tension and anxiety levels.

• Intentional Breathing / Breath Work: Practice to increase pulmonary capacity, create awareness for the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system, and train intentional breath regulation.

• Qigong and Tai Chi: Traditional somatic practices combining slow, deliberate movement, breath control, and mental focus to regulate the autonomic nervous system, improve proprioception, and cultivate internal physical balance.

• Controlled Thermal Stress: Practices using extreme heat or cold to trigger immediate somatic presence, such as cold exposure (e.g. Wim Hof Method) and sauna sessions, balance the autonomic nervous system and train stress resilience.

I recommend the practice of Vipassana meditation. It provides a quick and direct way to bring mind and body into frictionless symbiosis. You can book a 10-day course to study the technique and develop a consistent daily routine. Facilities are located around the globe. It’s free of charge including food and accommodation, you may donate as you please after the conclusion of the course. Your only investment is time and the courage to face yourself.

It is advisable to combine this practice with a bodily practice of meditative movement. Yoga for instance is very suitable because it is highly functional and includes both strengthening and stretching of all major muscle groups as well as treatment for joints and tissues, incorporating sitting, standing, and lying positions with breathing and meditation techniques.

That being said, one can find meditative depth to unify the mind and body in all kinds of bodily exercises or sports like rock climbing or tennis, some of them more or less effective for the cause.

The single most important criteria for your choosing is that you find consistency and peace in your practice.

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I never thought of co-working as a legit environment to get work done, but rather as a new fancy word for “getting distracted but with an unlimited supply of coffee”.

A couple of days ago I was working in a local café and stumbled into a chat with a girl with Siberian-Chinese heritage, living in Paris, who models for the big French brands like Chanel. Magazines, runway shows, photo shoots. You get the picture. We vibed and she suggested setting up a co-working session. Since I love getting out of my comfort zone I decided to give it a shot.

It turned out that such sessions have the potential to elevate not just my creativity but also my work efficiency and agility in terms of strategy and tactics. So what’s the exact concept of co-working that fosters such impactful benefits and what makes it different from traditional offices and other teamworking concepts?

Co-working ideally represents an environment in which a limited amount of carefully selected people work alongside each other on their projects or tasks within a collaborative open space, providing them with the option of knowledge exchange. This creates a setting in which phases of individual focused work and spontaneous open discussions alternate. “We’re the sum of the five people we surround ourselves with”, the model had said when pitching the co-working idea to me. There’s certainly much truth in that old phrase and it hints at the key factor for success: choosing the right people.

Unexpected Benefits

There are numerous benefits you might not expect initially when thinking about getting into co-working. Here are the main ones:

1. Creativity: Witnessing the way other people work and exchanging ideas with them, especially if they work on different projects, possibly even in different fields, is a strong accelerator for your creativity.

2. Perspective: Often we limit ourselves to the perspective of our profession. If you’re a programmer you most likely tend to see the world in terms of logic, process, and code. Whereas if you’re a filmmaker, you tend to see the world in terms of entertainment, storytelling, and script. With co-working you can gain immense perspective through other people’s professional viewpoints. If you’re an accountant co-working with a firefighter and a surgeon, they might benefit tremendously from your perspective on numbers while you might benefit from their view on time management and emergency protocols.

3. Encouragement: People outside your field of profession tend to find the projects you work on particularly interesting. Simply because they’re new and enticing from their perspective. Therefore chances are high that they’re much more emotionally supportive and encouraging towards you and your work.

4. Focus: The risk of distracting yourself from your work with your phone or social media is significantly lower. Even without talking, simply sitting amongst others who are deeply absorbed in their work triggers a psychological effect known as body doubling. Your brain naturally mirrors their focus, significantly reducing the impulse to check notifications or wander off.

5. Efficiency: To stay productive and be efficient in your work, it is crucial to balance focused work time with your other needs. Water, food, social interactions, physical movement. Interruptions from your co-workers will provide you with the breaks you need but might not take if you were alone. Breaks are key to anchoring your focus.

6. Rapid Feedback Loops: When you’re stuck on a problem, a fresh pair of eyes from a non-competitor sitting next to you can solve in two minutes what might have taken you two hours of solitary overthinking.

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Requirements to Make It Work

There are a few requirements that you should meet to successfully set up a co-working session that provides all the above-mentioned benefits. What you want is an environment that leverages your work, not one that hinders it.

1. The right people: Those are the ones who want to produce something, who have a vision to give birth to something creative, and who are already working on something specific. Wrong people are the ones who seek to be entertained, perceive their work as a chore, or are just floating around. So pick the enthusiasts, not the pessimists.

2. The right projects: The participants need a genuine desire to work on their individual projects. Ideally, it should be projects they have a passion for and give them a sense of purpose. While this concept also functions with people that “just need to get work done”, you might not experience the whole set of benefits described above within such a constellation.

3. The right environment: Pick a place that reflects the overall vibe of work and creation. That can be restaurants, cafés, homes, gardens, parks, office spaces, basically anything that suits your taste and material needs. You could be sitting in a public park on a ping pong table with the laptops on your knees. As long as you don’t rely on Wi-Fi or electricity and bring your food.

4. The right size: Keep the circle small, three to five people is ideal. If you’re just starting, pick one partner to explore the working dynamic and increase the circle as you go.

5. The right mindset: The participants need to consciously open up to the idea of interrupting and getting interrupted every now and then for discussion. You will ask each other for your opinion, give advice, coach, and brainstorm together, while developing a feeling for respecting each other’s focus time. The participants should think about the value they can provide to their co-workers, not what the others can do for them. Cultivate a mindset of giving and you will receive abundantly.

6. The right time frame: Set a time box for the session in which the participants commit to the practice. You can easily set up whole co-working days. If you’re just starting I’d recommend blocking three to five hours in the morning, for instance, 08:00 to 12:00 on a Saturday. If you choose a public space for your session, morning hours put you together with other like-minded people you could potentially connect with; instead of the party and leisure crowds that tend to come in the late afternoons and evenings.

Now, how do you get the people together? You simply ask and explain what you want to do. If they’re skeptical, tell them what a great experience it would be and ask them to give it a try. Don’t push hard against strong resistance or skepticism though. Remember, you want the open-minded ones with the go-for-it attitude.

How to Make It Work in Corporate Environments

If your only experience with this concept is within a corporate environment in which 75% of your colleagues more or less secretly hate their jobs, co-working tends to get reduced to interruption, distraction, fake work, and frustration.

To make this concept work in a corporate environment, you need to find the people who actually want to strive within the given system. Look beyond people’s masks and identify those driven by genuine purpose. Don’t pick the ones that just pretend for the sake of the pay rise and what the mainstream calls a “career”, without intrinsic interest. Be aware that this type of colleague represents the vast majority of all characters you will meet in the corporate world, from newbies to C-level executives. Keep your eyes open and identify the gold nuggets.

How do you do that? Observe people’s attitudes and behaviors. How do they respond to overtime? How do they speak about their work after hours? Are salary, vacation, and other benefits recurrent conversation topics for them? Do they share about achievements or lament over obstacles?

Build Your Tribe

Co-working is an incredibly powerful tool to build your tribe and your community. Simply because you build strong friendships and partnerships through mutual support with purposeful, creative work. It represents the absolute opposition to building connections through consumptive activities like going to bars or to the movies or meeting at home with wine gossiping about colleagues at work or complaining about the calamities of the day.

Does that mean you should stop going to bars or the movies? No. You should rather ask yourself who you want on your team. Jeffrey, who likes to eat eight liters of buttered popcorn in one go and has watched Guardians of The Galaxy 14 times, or Vincent, who dreams of building a new calendar app that predicts events with machine learning, is actively teaching himself how to code, and likes to work out in the evening? Create bonds with people you would want to fight on your side. And no bond is stronger than the one of determination, purpose, and direction.

The model and I were working on very different things. She was studying runway technique and fashion brand identity and was shaping and designing her social media portfolio and strategy. Whereas I was working on the technical backend of my website, setting up servers and email boxes, and developing a branding and color palette. And although our professions were so different, the overlap of work to be done was substantial. I learned about posting strategy and frequency on social media, about colors, taste, and style, about addiction patterns and coping mechanisms in relation to needs. Insights that all contribute to my work and personal journey.

If you haven’t tried a real co-working setting, go test the waters. It might surprise you.

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Do you truly know why you have chosen your partner? Because if not, you should find out. Right now.

A lot of people in all kinds of relationships—especially intimate ones—are not truly clear about the reasons they are committed in that specific setting. Very often we tend to assume the projection of what society defines as a morally acceptable relationship.

Why is that an issue? If you are not truly clear on your reasons and intentions, you will not only deceive yourself but also your partner about the essence and the predominant direction of your venture. Such relationships are doomed to fall apart from the outset.

The Delusion of the Ideal Morally Acceptable Relationship

Societal pressure is high. Movies, religion, and expectations from family and friends. They all seem to urge the display of an idealized relationship concept that follows specific acceptable rules and is based on specific acceptable virtues. For instance, the most common form of idealized relationship is the one in which “the partners love each other”.

By committing to a new relationship, we are often led to assume these societally carved rules and virtues as our own even if they don’t represent our highest individual standards, goals, and desires. The very moment we commit, we betray ourselves, creating friction between the mental concept and the actual bodily experience. This leads to a plethora of unfavorable consequences:

• To cope with the resulting mental friction we become prone to disconnect from our bodies, leading to tension, blocked energy centers, and a reduced capacity to process emotions; just to name a few.

• Particularly common is to become prone to using societally accepted drugs to numb our sensory experience to ease the friction.

• Deceiving your partner about your true intentions and virtues as an inevitable consequence of deceiving yourself ultimately is an act of dishonesty and untruthfulness, corroding all relational trust, which is the surest way to a breakup.

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What Relationships Are Founded On

Humans have many different reasons why they commit to relationships. Be it the need for security, sexual intimacy, social status, self-validation, comfort, loneliness, financial advantages, business purposes, power, fear, guilt, a lack of options, or the pressure of a closing reproductive window. In some cases, the reason might indeed be genuine love. Don’t fool yourself though. Love is certainly the last reason for the majority of relationships to be established and maintained, although it is the number one reason and virtue that’s being propagated by mainstream media.

Sometimes we are consciously unaware of our reasons for commitment to a relationship, sometimes we are unconsciously unaware of them.

Here’s the important thing to realize and accept responsibility for: Any moral concept aside, it doesn’t matter what your precise reasons are for committing to any relationship. The only thing that matters is that they are aligned with those of your partner. The alignment of reason and intention is one of the cornerstones of any healthy lasting relationship; not the half-hearted attempt to live up to some predefined societal virtue.

The most stable relationship might be the one founded on mutual comfort or sexual compatibility. It does not have to be genuine love just because society defines that as the highest morally acceptable form of common ground. The most unstable relationships are the ones pretending love to cover up misalignment in reason and intention.

Create Space for Realization

To shine the light of consciousness on the question of why you are with your partner, it is highly beneficial to put your mind and body in a condition as neutral and relaxed as possible to create the space for realization to unfold. You want to be in an emotionally balanced state, so your current moods and swings do not cloud your potential for insight. Ideally, you shape your day in a way that supports this balance.

1. Ground Your Mind & Body: Engage in activities that give you a sense of practical focus and release bodily tension, like a workout, running, stretching, or finishing simple tasks around the house.

2. Reconnect With Presence: Do things that bring you out of your head and into the present moment, like walking in nature, watching birds, or listening to the wind, all without screens and notifications.

3. Avoid Mind Distractions: Stay clear of anything designed to overstimulate the mind or intoxicate the body: movies, social media, pornography, parties, demanding phone calls, smoking, alcohol, and other drugs.

Ask Yourself the Question

At day’s end, full of relaxed purpose, healthy bodily and mental activities, and free from intoxicants, when you arrive home and feel emotionally balanced, you carve out some free time in silence and solitude.

Grab a notebook, a pen, and a glass of water. It’s time to ask yourself the question:

“Why have I chosen to be with my partner?”

Stay with this single question for some time. Give it space to unfold. Note down everything that comes up, both in your head and your body. Words, thoughts, emotions, feelings of incongruence or resistance. Anything.

Be brutally honest with yourself. Don’t shy away. Even if feelings like guilt, shame, fear, anger, or sadness come up during this act of self-reflection. Don’t judge, just realize.

The Evaluation

When you feel complete with your self-evaluation, ask yourself if the uncovered true reasons and intentions for your commitment to the relationship are aligned with your goals and your own values and beliefs.

• If not, you need to ask yourself whether you are willing to compromise your goals and values to maintain the relationship. The answer to that question should be no if you want to live a life of aligned purpose and self-respect.

• If yes, you want to evaluate whether your uncovered true reasons and intentions are aligned with those of your partner.

For example, you might realize that the true core reason for your commitment to the relationship is comfort and not any higher virtue like the practice of love as you have been communicating to your surroundings all along or as what has been pre-defined for you by society. You come to the conclusion that maintaining a relationship that provides more comfort than challenge does not conflict with your value system.

Talk to Your Partner

Take some time to process and integrate your realizations. As a final step, you need to consolidate them into your relationship by assessing if your partner’s reasons and intentions align with yours. Ask your partner to reflect on the same question or just send them this guide.

Within the relationship, your reasons and intentions must be aligned, regardless of whether your virtues and beliefs are mainstream-compliant. If they are not, you need to reassess your commitments.

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Near the center of Ubud, a small town in Bali, there is a place called 9 Angels & 9 Bambu. An outside kitchen place illuminated by warm light bulbs and bathed in smooth vibrations from a YouTube movie soundtrack playlist. When I dropped through the gate to seek shelter from the heavy rain under the small roof, the man running the place offered me a cup of ginger tea. A man presumably in his 50s and with a heart-opening sense of humor, totally at ease with himself and the present moment.

“How much is the tea?”
“Nothing, it’s just tea.”

Later that day I came back to have dinner, I sat at the kitchen counter and we got into a lengthy conversation. He was preparing different kinds of dishes. Cooking he learned from his mother. A French guy sat down next to me and confirmed that the man once cooked a traditional French dish for him that tasted exactly like the one his grandma would cook. The abundance of food and the laughter of good company spread blissful happiness among us.

“It’s sad that so many people are unhappy.”

Some time passed in silence before I asked:

“So why is it that people are unhappy?”

The man contemplated for a while, his eyes gazing into the distance.

“People choose to be unhappy.”
“So people could just choose happiness?”
“Yes. It’s like a switch. On. Off. Happy. Unhappy. Happy. Unhappy.”

He laughs. The feasting and joking continued for a while before it got late and it was time to leave.

“What do I owe you for the food?”
“Uhm, I don’t know.”

There is no menu. You serve yourself from the buffet or simply ask the man what you’d like to eat. At times he gives his guests a raw egg or some veggies and tells them to just cook it for themselves. He’s got two glass bottles hanging from the roof in which you can stuff Rupiah bills. You pay what you think.

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