2026-05-03

Smoking is ass-backwards meditation

You take a hit, you focus on your breath, you let your mind run, the coffee tastes better, the cigarette burns up your throat in just the perfect way. With a heavy heart, I have to say, that the practice of smoking is close to the practice of mindfulness.

While the in-the-moment peak of smoking can reach unbelievable highs, especially combined with liquids, there’s a hole left in you once the cigarette is done. The craving for the next cigarette only increases. The wheel of samsara keeps spinning.

During the act, smoking and meditation have similar mechanics. In the long term though, smoking is destructive, while meditation is deconstructive.

Smoking is ass-backwards meditation.

2026-04-27

Office zazen

Zen’s minimalist aesthetic is timeless.

Just the word itself is perfect, and everything surrounding the zen cosmos, like zen gardens and zazen posture, has this beautiful, all-encompassing void, black and white feel to it.

Just look at this diagram, ay:

You know I love looking at a dot on my laptop screen. And you know I love making seemingly boring habits of mine fun and spiritual.

I couldn’t help myself to make even the staring-at-dot work habit of mine spiritual. During dotting, I try to think of nothing, or as Sasha Chapin puts it, practice nothing. And, through no effort of my own, I envision a frog zen monk with a stick behind me correcting my posture while I stare at dot.

2026-04-17

Jensen on loser mindset

The premise that even if we competed in China, that we’re going to lose that market anyways… You’re not talking to somebody who woke up a loser. That loser attitude, that loser premise makes no sense to me.

~ Jensen Huang, Dwarkesh Podcast

Genuinely the most energized I felt in weeks hearing this. I adore the argumentation rhetoric of the rationality community and Western liberalism proper. Although sometimes the argumentation gets too technical, winning the clever small points while missing the big one. And sometimes it’s just too long.

Back in my childhood, in the gutters, you could just end arguments by telling people to grow up. Actually, we didn’t say “grow up”, we said “man up”. It’s stupid, but sometimes I wish I could go back to telling people to man up, to compete, and to stop whining. A return to tradition, if you will.

2026-04-15

Cold hearts on heated floors

Or: What do you do, spiritually, with a psychopath roommate?

Our culture assumes people can change. Be it therapy, moral appeals, punishment, we believe in personal growth and development. Psychopaths break every assumption and belief, we have no protocol for them.

Living with a dysfunctional roommate hurt me spiritually. I fished ungodly nasty stuff out of the kitchen sink regularly, had to clean on both weekend days to have some resemblance of an intact apartment. The one time a small piece of furniture broke off when I sat, I heard about it every single day.

No matter how much warmth and patience I provided, I was forever the perpetrator and she was forever the victim. No matter what I said, my own admitted character mistakes were the only relevant talking point. Arguing was wasted time, and that’s what hurt me most.

Was I not tactful, not wise enough? Before talking to her, I meditated for half an hour. Or are some souls truly unredeemable? I couldn’t look into her eyes anymore, I saw how her lies became her truth, how she rewrote reality.

And when it is said to them, ‘Do not cause corruption on the earth,’ they say, ‘We are but reformers.’ Unquestionably, it is they who are the corrupters, but they perceive not. And when it is said to them, ‘Believe as the people have believed,’ they say, ‘Should we believe as the foolish have believed?’ Unquestionably, it is they who are the foolish, but they know not.

~ Surah Al-Baqarah

On a society level, I don’t know what to do with psychopaths.

Some hearts are sealed. Not clouded, not in need of more warmth. Sealed.

God has set a seal upon their hearts and upon their hearing, and over their vision is a veil.

~ Surah Al-Baqarah

On a personal level, I now learned what to do with sealed people. Almost always, my answer is reciprocation, with physical and spiritual grace. In cases like her, the only smart move is not to play.

Move out. Close your mind. Seal your heart to them, like theirs is sealed. Some souls are unredeemable by you. There is no advice, no words, no key you will find.

Whenever you leave what hurts you, the gain has immediately begun

~ Turkish proverb

2026-04-13

One step at a time

I just ran a marathon without real training. Finished 5 minutes under the disqualification limit (5:30:00), but that was exactly my goal 🙃.

My whole body hurt, but I genuinely had a great time. Friends and even random spectators commented on how good and happy I looked. Some thoughts I had during the race:

Endurance is scarce
Each step is one step closer to finishing the bucket list
Gratefulness will make you/life run better
I don’t know if I have a higher pain tolerance, or if I just feel less pain to begin with when compared to other people¹
Always be movin’ theory is real, folks

Sub 4 is the goal for next year!

Feet don’t fail me now, take me to the finish line

Oh, my heart, it breaks every step that I take

But I’m hoping at the gates, they’ll tell me that you’re mine

Walking through the city streets, is it by mistake or design?

~ Lana Del Rey

Footnotes:

My hunch is both. When I carry a cup that’s burning my hands, I don’t scream, I slowly put it down and then say “ow, that was hot.” My dentist was always so happy he didn’t have to use anesthesia on me, even when doing tricky and deep surgeries on my teeth. ↩

2026-04-09

Jane Austen

To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love

~ Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

2026-04-08

The always-be-moving-forward trick for getting out of bed and getting good grades

My trick for getting out of the bed is to keep moving. One leg out of the blanket, then one arm, then the other leg. And so on. You will be out of the bed before you know it. Same trick works for studying super boring topics at university. Sit down, start making progress. Don’t evaluate if you feel like it.

The subtle part: just like in soccer penalties¹, you never stop moving. No matter how slow, you keep going.

This is related to the no days off principle. If something feels expensive to do, you will do it less. That’s demand and utilization. Make it cheap, and it can even be fun if you talk yourself into it.

Also, put the phone far away from you.

Footnotes:

“a player stops in his run-up, it is an offence for which he shall be cautioned” ↩

2026-04-06

On intelligence

Knowledge is knowing your discarded toenails contain keratin, which in turn, contains nitrogen. And that your living room plants need nitrogen.

Wisdom is not putting your toenails in the plant pot.

Intelligence is making the leap from knowledge to wisdom. Or rather, it’s having the sensibility to put the toenails there, but having the wisdom to bury them deep in the pot, so people don’t see what you did. And intelligence is still not doing this in front of your friends, or talk about this in front of your friends. Maybe intelligence is hard-to-define, but it for sure entails the skill to not talk about this publicly. “Intelligence is what AI is not able to do,” they say ... but even AI will tell you to not talk about your toenails in your plant pot, so ... on a second thought, if you have hippie friends they might see what you do as resourceful, and it might be genuinely status increasing and inspiring that you put your toenails into plant pots. Ah well, this isn’t the neat conclusion I wanted to reach. Probably intelligence is heavily context dependent, and path dependent. And dependent on if you actually put your toenails into that pot or not, and if you behaved wisely while doing it. I guess intelligence is more of a verb?

2026-04-05

Bucket list: 40 for 40

Two months until thirty. Ten years until forty. Forty things I want to experience in between:

Hold a talk or an event at the Colosseum
Win a BJJ match
Attend a Sufi dhikr ceremony
Play an official soccer match again
Live in California again, specifically the bay area
Attend a jhana retreat
Learn how to sharpen knives properly
Be in the best shape of my life (the leanest or the most effective I have ever been)
Host at a technical conference
Learn a Latin language
Have someone come up to me and tell me something I wrote or said inspired them
Learn Arabic, read books from the golden age of Islam
Hold Swiss, German, and Turkish passports
Have equity in something, acquire land
Be married
Have kids
Leave something that gave me enormous success because the marginal loss was greater
Achieve enlightenment/fana, only the beginning
Maintain a narrated chronicle of my life, week by week, marking what happened
Complete a multi-day water fast
Record my parents telling their life story
Do improv at an open mic session
Run one marathon every year
Build a network where any two phone calls can solve almost any problem
Write my dad a letter in Turkish that makes him cry
Go a full year without missing a single day of publishing
Try transcranial ultrasound neuromodulation
Go back to Dortmund and give a talk or workshop for kids there
Start doing videos
Visit Korea, China, Tibet, Nepal
Learn my mom’s recipes
Do a major contribution to a technical project I love
Have a real, extended conversation with someone whose watcher also never sleeps
Fund someone else’s dream with no strings attached
Keep a powerful secret and never leverage it
Learn three chords and write one song and record yourself singing it
Reclaim something abandoned (a neighborhood, a company, a tradition, an idea) and make it alive again, and make it outlive you
Build an artifact that is simultaneously machine, art, and prayer
Learn dancing on a longboard
Increase liberty and happiness in the world

See ya in 10 years.

2026-03-29

ruminous fee

i have tried prudent planning long enough
from now on
insane

far away from home
once a city;
i turned into ruin

though
my essence flourished
by paying this ruinous fee

2026-03-28

The underrated benefits of always having oatmeal at lunch

$the \"they don't know\" party meme: a guy standing alone at a house party holding a bowl of oatmeal with the caption \"they don't know this oatmeal slaps\" while everyone else socializes with pizza and fancy food$

For me, eating oatmeal at lunch every day is almost a spiritual experience. Let me give you my rundown:

it’s healthy and cheap
it’s a great and efficient routine, one decision less each day
counterintuitively, it enables a wide variety of tastes

Healthy and cheap

Healthy, cheap and vegan. You can enrich it with bananas or goji berries for extra nutrients. You can use oat milk or other fluids that are enriched with stuff you might be lacking, like vitamin D and calcium.

Great and efficient routine

You have more time in the lunch break to do whatever. You can legitimately get down the ratio you like better each time you make it. If you skip breakfast, you are craving food by lunchtime¹.

Tribal creatures we are, there is always an undercurrent of “what will my work colleagues think about this?” Doing it anyway builds genuine self-confidence. I also think it’s secretly high status: you open the door for your work mates to do similar weird shit at lunch.

It doesn’t even mean you eat worse overall. My work colleagues might doubt this, but I cook really nice dinners. Oatmeal at noon is what enables that, in a kabbalistic way I can’t describe.

Variety

I’ll try to describe the exoteric side anyway: if you constrain your life in one area, it opens up a lot of options in another area. If you constrain your sleeping and wake-up time, that’s the only real way to have a routine where you write each morning, or exercise each morning, or do whatever each morning. Variety comes from constraint.

You can min-max your oatmeal with whatever nutrition (and taste) you need, and can even do morphological analysis on your combinations:

Fluid	Base oats	Topping 1 (fruit)	Topping 2 (seeds/nuts)	Topping 3 (extra)
Oat milk	Rolled oats	Blueberries	Chia seeds	Goji berries
Water	Instant oats	Banana	Flaxseed	Honey
Soy milk	Steel cut oats	Apple	Walnuts	Cinnamon
Coconut milk	Overnight oats	Mango	Almonds	Cocoa powder
Almond milk		Raspberries	Pumpkin seeds	Peanut butter
		Strawberries	Hemp seeds	Protein powder

I swear, I genuinely feel people are missing out on the greatness of oatmeal at lunch.

The easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have

~ William Irvine

2026-03-09

How does your country pronounce "Wi-Fi"?

$Choropleth world map showing how 193 countries pronounce \"Wi-Fi,\" divided into four categories. \"Why-Fy\" (teal) dominates with 118 countries, covering the English-speaking world, Latin America, the Arab world, Russia, East Asia, South Asia, and most of Africa. \"Wee-Fee\" (red) covers 63 countries including France, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Chile, the Netherlands, Eastern Europe, Turkey, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Francophone Africa. \"WLAN\" (orange) applies to just 2 countries: Germany and Austria, which use the term WLAN instead of Wi-Fi entirely. \"Mixed\" (purple) marks 9 countries with competing pronunciations, including Switzerland, Lebanon, Morocco, Greece, Cameroon, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Eritrea. The legend is positioned in the South Pacific, left of South America.$

International flights, connect me to the Wi-Fi

The only way you reach me, huh

~ Pusha T

2026-03-06

The Ozempic theory of societal change

Ozempic is the moment society stops pretending that discipline alone should govern the body.

If you take steroids you’re a loser — that’s the mood. It’s almost similar with Ozempic today¹, but the mood is shifting.

From what we know, Ozempic is safe², and people love it because of the upsides: improved health, looks. Downstream from that, confidence. Healthier, happier people lead to a healthier, happier society.

It follows that Ozempic won’t just make us healthier, it will change how we as a society think about external interventions into our bodies. I argue this shift will also lead to us becoming spiritually healthier, with the help of external devices.

There’s a growing literature on transcranial ultrasound neuromodulation, a noninvasive way to reach deep equanimity. You point ultrasound at specific brain regions, modulating neural activity toward equanimity, all without surgery. It’s a hot topic, soon you’ll hear all about these devices in societal discourse.

If you react with puritan disgust (why would anyone want help to meditate, this is backwards from its purpose), start observing how the mood around Ozempic changes in your society. Being overweight has huge effects on people’s lives, and by extension, society. Not being equanimous does too. You can almost run down the entire list of seven deadly sins: anger, envy, greed, pride — all failures of equanimity.

Within ten years, the idea that mental states must only be achieved through discipline will look as outdated as the idea that bodily weight loss should only come from discipline. Ozempic is just the first domino. I actually don’t know which intervention comes next, but they’re coming. All I know is that Ozempic’s success makes society change its mind.

Footnotes:

This is in the Western European context, where the puritan disgust around body interventions runs deep ↩
There are behavioral changes people discuss as downsides, I don’t want to downplay them too much, but from what we know, Ozempic is the real deal ↩

2026-02-25

Nasreddin on the Djinn of Algebra

A young man rushed to Nasreddin Hodja’s house, breathless and wide-eyed.

“Hodja, I have seen something extraordinary. A new kind of intelligence is coming into the world. Not from scholars, not from books, but conjured from algebra. This intelligence will be everywhere. Nothing will ever be the same.”

Nasreddin nodded slowly and sipped his chai.

“But Hodja, my friends won’t listen! I try to warn them, I try to explain, but they laugh at me. They don’t believe it. How do I make them understand?”

Nasreddin set down his cup.

“You say this thing will soon be everywhere?”

“Yes! Abundant. Unlimited. Like water from a spring.”

“Let me understand this,” said Nasreddin. “You say a great intelligence is spawning, almost like a djinn?”

“Greater than anything.”

“And yet you, a capable human, who has seen this, cannot convince a single friend?”

The young man blinked.

“Then you both are not so intelligent,” said Nasreddin, “or you are possessed by this. If this thing is truly as clever as you say, why doesn’t it do the convincing?”

2026-01-03

No days off

In the theme of 2026 and new habits, here’s what worked for me: the no days off principle¹.

Let’s say you want a good sleep rhythm, start exercising for reals this time, write more, etc. When dreaming up these habits, you automatically visualize the gold standard: the perfect 8-hour sleep, the unbelievably energizing exercise, the writing of exactly one hour in the morning, getting one article done per day. Ah, beautiful.

The flip side is that if you don’t achieve this dreamed up scenario, you feel bad and lose the habit. Also, because you have such a high expectation of the habit, you’re less likely to start. So in reality, the daily decision matrix looks like this:

Decision matrix with two rows (good motivation days, no motivation days) and two columns (doing the activity, skipping). Green checkmarks for doing on good days and skipping on bad days. Red X's for the opposite.

Skipping an activity you swore to do is such a normal thing that I don’t think I need to further explain the matrix and its implications. Some days, you skip the habit because of low motivation.

There’s a better way to frame the problem, in which skipping the habit is the ultimate enemy. This is the framing of the no days off principle — do a little even on days with no motivation. Here is the decision matrix with the new framing:

Decision matrix with a middle column added: doing the activity a little. Green checkmarks for doing the full activity on good days and doing a little on bad days. Red X's for skipping.

Let’s reframe the good sleep habit we want to achieve with this new matrix. The first insight is the trick of having good sleep is not really waking up early, but going to sleep early. But life happens, throughout the year you won’t always control when you sleep. You can, however, always wake up at 7am. So let’s reframe the habit to “Wake up at 7am each day”. Of course, of course, getting 7-8 hours of sleep is the gold standard. But! Internalize that the gold standard isn’t always possible, and skipping the habit is the enemy. So wake up at 7am, even if it means less sleep. In fact, we know that being regular in your sleep cycles might be more important than getting the perfect amount of sleep each night.

Reframing the other habits: exercise (a little) each day, write (a little) each day. That way you stay in motion, you beat the enemy. If you haven’t done exercise, just go out and do a little — just do some pushups, man, if you really have no time. You will notice that you will exercise more regularly, and once you started with just a few pushups, you’ll likely do more.

Instead of defining your habit goals as “exercise more” or “lose x amount of weight”, rather write them as doing something every day, and never stop. You also compound if you do it every day, and long-term, a little gain beats a loss. No excuses!