Month: November 2025

It’s so much better than a cold one.

Germans tend to not want to turn on the heating. It’s almost a competition at times. Who’ll be the last to finally give in? Of course, leaving the heater off saves money. But what good is money when you have pneumonia? Or when you’re not enjoying sitting on your couch? It’s an old habit back from when heating cost a lot and, in poorly isolated farmhouses, was a life-or-death matter. Today, I venture it is self-torture disguised as frugality in most cases.

But not us! My family, and thankfully also my fiancée, all like it cozy. A warm house is one in which you can move freely. A warm house feels relaxing, comfortable, and safe. It also makes the people living in it more gracious. A little less prone to being on edge and lashing out. After all, who’s feeling generous when they’re cold?

For the first two years of living in our apartment, my partner and I had to make additional heating payments. I suspect it will be the same in year three—and once again entirely worth it. Still, one point I’ll give to my shiverous countrymen and -women: Nothing makes you appreciate your heating more than returning home after a week away, turning it back on, and waiting for it to kick in. For us it takes about 24 hours until the apartment is back to normal, and that’s a real chance for a gratitude check-in.

Here’s to warm houses—and to letting them go cold once in a while so we can remember how precious they actually are.

A few months ago, I realized maybe it’s okay to be obsessed with Pokémon cards for a while. To hunt down as many items as I can on my “forever collection” list. Stuff I’d like to own forever, maybe pass down to my kids, perhaps sell in old age if, by then, people still want it. Sometimes, it’s nice to be dogged.

I couldn’t fully put my finger on why I thought it was okay to be obsessed as part of a phase. Determination, achieving goals, sure, there’s something to be said for it in the way of accomplishment. But I sensed it was more than that.

I think now I’m realizing that one other aspect is that obsession permits acceleration. When you fight the obsession with something that has a relatively clear end point—like a collection target that’s 80 or 90% complete—you might just be drawing out the inevitable. Why not throw more weekends at it sooner rather than later? Get to the state you want to reach, then move on and focus on another phase.

The trick, of course, is knowing when and where the obsession ends. If you keep moving the goalpost, being obsessed is a quick way to run out of money, energy, motivation, or all three. There has to be a stopping point, and it must feel somewhat natural to let go once you hit it. Can you determine that in advance? If so, I say have at it. Enjoy your retro video game flea market hunting, your excessive new stock of cooking equipment, or your daily garden walks on your perfectly green lawn.

If you know at which station your train’s supposed to make its final stop, it’s okay to get there as fast as you can.

Yesterday, I wrote about my grandpa making a beautiful menu card for my aunt’s wedding. The one part I left out: There was a typo on it. The word “champignon” was spelled with an extra “i.”

When I first spotted the error, I was about to point it out. Just out of habit and my own obsession with grammar. Then, I thought better of it. “Who’ll benefit from this?” I asked myself.

My grandpa? No. He already has an excellent command of the German language. I’m sure it really was just a typo. The guests? It wasn’t like you couldn’t understand the word anymore. It was still perfectly clear. And the champignon sauce tasted just as brilliant. I doubt it’d even have made me look smart. Perhaps petty, if anything.

So the answer to that question was obvious: “No one.” Ergo, I said nothing. And lo and behold, no one else said anything for the whole evening either.

Sometimes, grace means looking at the essence instead of the details. Not every mistake must be pointed out.

At 85, there’s no longer any beating around the bush: My grandpa is old. He’s also one of the most active people I know.

He founded his small village’s carnival club in 1961. Then, he was its president for almost 50 years. He still supports every event and attends many of them in person. He also still writes articles for the local newspaper, another gig he’s held for many decades. He must have published hundreds of them at this point.

When, recently, my aunt got married, grandpa got some custom paper with flowers on it and, using Word on his computer, printed the food and drinks menu for all the guests. During prep, they realized the holders for the menu cards they had bought were too wide. He grabbed some cardboard coasters, bent the edges at the bottom, and stuck them in-between the food and drink menus. Voilà—a beautiful, two-sided menu on every table.

After dinner, I sat there, looking at it. It really struck me. This menu card was just…amazing. So I’d like to take a moment and spell one thing out loud and clear: Old people can make cool things. Just because our contributions grow smaller, maybe a bit quieter in our later years does not diminish those contributions one bit—and it’s never too late for an old dog to surprise a youngster with a new trick.

If I’m lucky, one day, I will be old—and you bet I’ll still make cool things.

I worked late-ish again yesterday. The sun had come out briefly during the afternoon, and I had hoped to go for a stroll before it yet again retreated. It was not to be.

Not having left the house for two full days or so, I was fed up. So when I finally finished work, and the sun had already passed the horizon, I decided to go out anyway. Dinner ended up running a bit late, but so what? At last! Movement! Fresh air! Plus I got to mail out a Pokémon card that was due for shipping.

Is it nicer to walk when the sun is out in full force? Oh yeah, sure. But sometimes, even when you recognize them, you’ll have to let ideal conditions pass only to do something under less supportive conditions later. Suboptimal timing doesn’t make a good decision a bad one. It just makes you late. And, as they say, better late than never!

When life’s not a walk in the park, you can still take a walk in the dark. It might not feel as rosy, but the exercise will work its magic all the same.

When I got back into Pokémon card collecting, I brought my investing attitude right with it. Once I had felt my way into the game, I didn’t pull any punches. A thousand euros here, a thousand euros there, why not buy some boxes to store away of this set, too?

I quickly built various positions, and as luck would have it, I did so right before the biggest Pokémon boom in history. Up to today, I’ve almost doubled my money, and I’m now sitting on more than a few thousand euros worth of cardboard. Okay. So far, so good.

But now that Pokémon has sort of become part of my overall portfolio and wealth building strategy, I’ve decided to slow down. I could never buy everything I wanted, not for the sealed investments, nor for the cards I’d like to collect, and I feel good about how much stuff I’ve crammed into my parents’ basement (thanks mom and dad!).

So recently, I’m shifting focus. I’m trying to wrap up a few mini sets and buy some cards I want for my personal collection before they get super expensive. Then, I want to take a break altogether. Ergo, I’m not actively putting in more money. I’m only doing deals to acquire what I need at the best price possible. Throw in a few cards I’d like to sell, and suddenly, instead of checking out four-figure carts at online ships, I’m sending people photos on Ebay’s classified section in hopes of selling a 50-euro card or getting 10% off one that costs 120. Can you spot the difference?

On the one hand, this is a good thing. It’s teaching me firsthand what, in theory, I’ve already known: Investing in physical assets is not the same as buying liquid stocks on an app. Every offer needs a market—and if you can’t agree on a price with somebody, you can’t sell. If push comes to shove, you might want to take a 10% haircut on the supposed market rate just to actually turn your cardboard into cash.

The bigger lesson, however, is that this whole phase post-shift is a distraction. When I was starting, deliberately investing good chunks of money, my mind was set on the big picture. “Let me hold on to these for the next 10, 20, 30 years or so and see where it leads.” As a result, I made big moves with confidence, and I wasted no time splitting hairs. Now I’m stuck in the weeds, dealing with small items, small transactions, and I can feel my mind has shrunk accordingly.

It’s funny. In the right context, you can spend as much time worrying about saving ten bucks as you can about spending 1,000, even if the former will barely make a dent in your wallet. But if that’s the case, that’s not the right frame of mind to be in. Not just at certain times. Ever. Whatever stage you’re at, add another zero. On a multi-month or multi-year timescale, moonshots are the only shots worth taking.

So, reminder to self: Small mind, small decisions. Don’t get stuck in a game of tic-tac-toe when you should be playing Monopoly.

Kurzgesagt is a popular Youtube channel with almost 25 million subscribers. They publish beautifully animated and well-researched explainers of everything under the sun, including politics, science, and the sun itself. A recent topic? AI slop strangling the internet—and even three-billion-view entertainment empires like Kurzgesagt.

As per their research, more than half of the internet’s activity already goes back to bots. But they’re not just crawling, observing, absorbing our data like they used to. Since the advent of ChatGPT and co, the bots have started making things, and it’s beginning to show. “In 2025, there were already well over 1,200 confirmed AI news websites publishing massive amounts of AI-generated misinformation and false narratives,” Kurzgesagt explains. Not only is this making research more difficult—especially since AI lies so confidently in our faces all the time—but it might be the start of an irreversible decline in the glorious stock of human knowledge we’ve built up online thus far.

The team explains that while researching a topic for a video, they ran into the usual problems with AI. Some sources were inaccurate or outright false. Eventually, they even discovered some of the quoted sources were actually already written by AI! But while Kurzgesagt scrapped the project and started over, someone else didn’t, and voilà, a popular Youtube video citing all kinds of wrong ideas showed up on an AI-run channel a few weeks later. “This is where the death of the internet begins,” the team says.

Because guess what AI will now provide as a source for that topic? That AI-generated video! Once AI starts mostly referencing itself instead of proper, human-vetted information, the average quality of what you find online will fall off a cliff—and given the vast quantities of information generated at rapid speed, it’s unlikely to recover any time soon.

The Great Library of Alexandria was one of humanity’s first attempts at compiling its collective knowledge. Part of it burned down, and all of it was lost eventually. Now, we are “letting [AI] add new shelves to the library of human knowledge,” but since AI isn’t ready to do this responsibly, “the library of human knowledge is getting less and less reliable.”

We’ve already handed over a lot to Big Tech: our privacy, data, and attention. Now, it’s coming for our knowledge. Not by taking what we have but by choking it in a sea of artificial information garbage. It looks like the second time around, Alexandria will drown instead of burn—unless we deliberately choose human—human art, human ideas, human connection—first.

Lately, I’ve been through a string of bad follow-ups on TV. Many shows or movies whose first installments I rated with a 9 or a 10 deserved no more than a 5 or a 6 for their second run. Alice in Borderland. The Sandman. The Old Guard 2. Several Marvel and DC continuations.

Initially, these franchises built up their worlds. They introduced a pace, a cast of characters, a setting, visual vibe, and soundtrack. Then, they sent the characters on a journey. I got to know them. I grew to like some of them while disliking others. And I became invested in their adventures. These adventures were meaningful, but even if they hadn’t been, it would have been easy enough to pull me in. After all, everything was new!

But once you’ve set up a group of heroes and they’ve completed their first quest, the question becomes: What next? Where to now? And it seems movie and TV producers often don’t have an answer. This is both the opposite and part of the reason of Hollywood’s massive commitment issues. You’ve already decided you’re returning to that story—but now what are you going to do with it? If the answer falls flat, your show ends with a whimper, and who wants to repeat that mistake?

Sequels often underperform because sequels are hard. Without a kickass story, there’s nothing to carry the tale. We already know the world and characters. It’s no longer enough to just have them meander through life, engage in pointless action, or repeat what they did last time. The above examples all committed either one or several of these crimes, and that’s why all they could get out of me by the time the credits rolled was “meh.”

You might not write movies, but you, too, dish out sequels. What’s next for dinner? How do you follow up on a project that landed well? What will you talk about on your second date? In stories as in life, sometimes, the hardest part is to keep going. You won’t always do it brilliantly, but it’s still worth your best effort every time.

Thank hard about your second chapters.

Responding to one of my more emotional stories, a reader wrote in: “I wonder what kind of stability and peace brings out such simplistic profound writing.”

I was grateful for the comment, but I told her that, actually, most of the time, it works the other way around: It’s the writing giving me a bit more stability and peace.

I’m not a zen guru who walks around emanating peace—at least not most of the time. I get angry, frustrated, confused, and flustered. I get worried, anxious, and frightened.

But then I sit down to write. I think about the story, the reader, and which word to put where. I stop thinking of myself for a bit, and by the time I’m done, a little bit of that anger, frustration, or fear has subsided. I feel a tad more settled. Grounded. Calmer. And I’m ready to start my day.

Sure, every now and then, I’m in a blissful state before I start typing. I’ve managed to carve out some space and send a ray of light into the universe. But without me writing whenever I feel the opposite of ecstatic, I’d never get to that place.

We see a pattern and think that X precedes Y, but maybe it works the other way around. Swap cause and effect. Does it still make sense? Sparks can travel in any direction—and so most connections go both ways.

Even around the turn of the millennium, when Pokémon cards were entirely new, more kids seemed to collect them than played the game. In a way, this was to be expected. After all, the video games the cards were based on egged players on to “catch them all!” So when the little monsters showed up on paper, kids continued what they had begun on their Game Boys.

But the Pokémon Trading Card Game was always conceived as a game. It was meant for you to play and battle other trainers—also just like in the video game, by the way. I did build decks and play matches, even attended the local Pokémon league on a regular basis for a while. But since getting back into collecting some 25 years later, outside of the odd virtual match here and there, I hadn’t played the original card game at all. Yesterday, that changed.

Around the time I rejoined the hobby, The Pokémon Company released a special box: Pokémon Trading Card Game Classic. It was a set designed to play, with three decks built around the original starter Pokémon but including many cards from over the years. It even came with a full playing board, damage counters, and so on. Online, people mostly argued the price was too high, that it would not be a great investment, yada yada…but I knew it was perfect for someone like me—someone who wants to get back in the game without getting lost in all the new rules and mechanics.

So for a while now, that box had been sitting at my parents’ house, fully prepped, ready to go. There was only one problem: Who would play with me? Yesterday, I finally found a fellow trainer: My fiancée agreed to give it a go. It was more fun than she expected! I quickly brushed up on the rules, explained them to her, and we were off, looking to see who can evolve their starter Pokémon first, knock out some mons, and take the prize. Besides still being a fun game a quarter century later even in its most basic variant, I have to say: Playing the game, using the cards for their intended purpose, added a new sense of depth to my collecting.

First, there’s the matter of actually reading the attacks on the cards before you slap them into your binder. I tried to do that already beforehand, but now I’m even more curious to do so. To see how they might fit into the deck I’ve already played.

Second, it makes you appreciate the many variants of the same card that exist in the game. A strong card in competitive play is cool—even if it’s not the rarest version. I think I’ll value common cards a bit more from now on.

It’s easy to slap a beautiful painting on your wall but never actually, properly look at it again. It’s one thing to point at it when visitors stop by. But do you still stand in front of it and admire the art?

If your car is your pride and joy, there’s nothing wrong with cleaning it every weekend. But do you still take it for proper drives, too? Do you ever take it to the race track or a setting where it can stretch into its potential?

Whether it’s a hobby or precious acquisition: Shine a light from all angles on the things you care about. Enjoy your favorite way of interacting with them, but keep trying new ones. Add more color to an already-shimmering diamond! Most of all, follow the rules from time to time. Get back to basics. Put tools to their intended purpose.

Even if all it’ll do is make you a happier collector, every now and then, use the cards to play.