Month: December 2025

On Friday, I had to collect something in the city in the middle of the day. I knew it would mean around two hours away from work. I try to end a bit earlier on Fridays regardless, and I wasn’t too busy, but I still wanted to take my work phone with me, just in case.

Less than 200 meters away from my house, I realized I had forgotten the phone. It was still sitting on my desk, charging. But it was also too late to run back and grab it. I’d miss my collection appointment. Ugh! Anxiously, I proceeded without my phone.

I returned almost exactly two hours later. Good estimate! When I opened my laptop, I found…the status quo. Nothing had changed. I had perhaps one or two extra messages, if those. Other than that? I could pick up where I had left off. No one had even noticed.

I finished my work, then wrapped up for the day. In the end, everything got done. My to-dos. My chores. And the only unnecessary task was worrying about my phone.

Will anyone remember this in five days? Will anyone still care in five weeks? What about five years down the road? These are all good questions to ask when you find an issue gnawing at you. Even for the moment, the same principle often applies: Will anyone even notice?

It’s not about getting away with shortcuts. It’s about whether panicking would be considered an appropriate response by people other than you. Usually, those situations are obvious. Everyone is in a state of alert. “Let’s raise all hell and get this done, people!” Most of the time, it’s just you—so you might as well skip the worry.

You are the vast, infinite sea of endless calm. Don’t let small waves rock your big boat.

In Hunter x Hunter, the 19-year-old Leorio is obsessed with one thing: money. As a boy, he lost his best friend because neither of them could afford the expensive medicine for his rare disease. His drive to be able to pay for any and all healthcare in the future takes him a long way. He passes the nearly impossible hunter exam and wins the license that’s like a cheat code for printing money.

Leorio’s friend Kurapika is even more zealous. His entire family was killed for their precious, scarlet-red eyes, making him the last living member of the Kurta clan. Kurapika’s desire for vengeance is boundless, and he regularly puts his own life on the line just to hunt down the Phantom Troupe responsible for the massacre.

Some people turn a lack in younger years into fuel for decades to come. Scarcity can be a powerful motivator. “If only I’d had money, strength, influence.” But in most cases, this source of energy runs out before its owners do. Scarcity fades with every piece of gold you attain. Sooner or later, you’ll realize you have enough.

Gon and Killua, the last two members in Hunter x Hunter‘s main character quartet, have different inspirations from the start. They’re curious, free, and not always sure what they want—but they do know one thing: They love their friends, and they would do anything to protect them. They’re fighting to keep, not to get. That’s why neither Leorio nor Kurapika will ultimately surpass them. Even the latter, for all his anger, eventually realizes it’s better to save your alive friends than to avenge your dead ancestors.

“A real soldier does not fight because he has something that he hates in front of him,” G. K. Chesterton wrote in the 1910 New Year’s Eve edition of The Illustrated London News. “He fights because he has something that he loves behind his back.”

Know why you’re marching, and don’t be ashamed to admit you’ve found better reasons.

Perhaps you’ve witnessed this scenario when invited to a get-together: Someone declines for their entire party, but they make the “we” a really big deal. I remember an instance of this in a college chat group a few years ago.

Two friends of ours had started dating, and they were both in the group, invited as individuals. One of them said no, but the message was the equivalent of capitalizing “WE” every time they mentioned it and adding a couple emoji at the end for good measure. At least, that’s what it felt like at the time.

I also remember some folks gossiping about the event later on, and I’m pretty sure I agreed with their take: “It’s fine that you’re a couple now, but it’s not like you’ve grown together at the hip.”

Well, the other day, I was editing an article about my and my fiancée’s trip to Japan, and guess what? I realized I kept writing “we” and “our” all the time. Of course, we were on the holiday together. It wasn’t an “I” trip at any moment—but you, the reader, don’t know that. And unless our togetherness is relevant to the piece, you also won’t care. So if I keep saying “we” and “our” without you even knowing who I mean, that would be hella confusing.

This is not the first time that “we” has snuck into my writing. It’s been happening more since we moved in together, and I guess that makes sense. The more you become a family, the more you’ll think on behalf of everyone rather than just yourself. But it does make for interesting patterns in communication.

For example, whenever I mention our apartment on my blog, I’m tempted to say “our apartment.” It’s not my apartment only, after all. And even if I were to write that, it wouldn’t change the fact that my fiancée pays half the rent. So suddenly, I’d be taking more credit than I deserve. If I was alone, I wouldn’t live in this big and expensive of a flat. It’s our togetherness that makes it possible, so it only feels fair for me to mention. But of course I also don’t want to throw a quick “my partner” into every story just because, especially if the article is about cleaning, not cohabitating.

Was that chat incident way back when someone bragging or just young love? I’ll never know. But I have discovered the point when first person plural simply feels natural, and I must say: No matter how it looks in conversation, it sure feels nice to live as a “we” every day.

For many years, I hosted my brother-in-law’s website domain. It was a simple CV page to help him get a job. Now, he didn’t need it any more. So I canceled it. Little did I know this cancellation would feel like the beginning of a book rather than its ending.

Godaddy, the registrar company, sent me nine mails about the domain’s termination. Nine. And somehow, I have a feeling they’re not quite done.

Godaddy sent three emails leading up to the cancellation dates. “Your domain expires soon.” Okay, fair enough. Some people forget to auto-renew and lose their websites. It happens. On the day of, they sent another message. “Renew your expired products before you lose them.” Interesting. If my products have expired, haven’t I already lost them? And isn’t that kind of the point of an expiration date?

Of course, Godaddy makes money whenever someone pays for another year of ownership to a domain. And if it’s not an insanely popular address, who better to ask to pay for it again than the person who originally bought it? From their point of view, they can’t send you enough reminders to renew. Any day you take the bait is a good day for Godaddy.

I received three more emails after the domain was gone. The third was a “final cancellation notice,” in all caps of course. But guess what? I got two more notifications since then. “Urgent! Domain has expired! Save it by the end of the month!” Um, it’s okay, I think you can stop trying.

In life, in business, or with people, the problem with desperate moves is that, most of the time, we can tell your desperation is the main reason you’re making them—and that’s never a good look. The best desperation can trigger is sympathy, and while that might get you an extension, it’s not enough to last.

You don’t need to hide your despair, mind you. It’s not about pretending all is well. But whatever you do, you must show us there’s more than just despair that keeps you going. Why did you start in the first place? What was so important it got you into this situation? Make us stay for the story, and perhaps you’ll live to fight another day.

And if not? That’s okay, too. At least most of the time. Sometimes, we must let the old expire to make room for something new. Just try not to send nine emails about it.

It was probably the last ten years. My architect friend Matt must have reminded me that we had plenty of space a dozen times. But I’m human, you know? I forget. That is, until yesterday.

Yesterday, Matt showed me the numbers. The numbers are simple to grasp: Since 1950, the number of flats in Germany has tripled. In that same time frame, the population has grown by 20%. Technically, that’s all you need to know. Why can’t we fit 20% more people into 200% more flats?

That’s where the debate opens the door to nuance. And more numbers, of course. Like the average square meters of housing per person going up by 37% in the last 30 years alone. Or the share of one- and two-person households going from 45% to 75%. Or the fact that most people live in or near big cities, whereas the countryside has space but not enough job opportunities. And so on.

Still, the original two items on the scale remain: 43 million flats and houses, 83.5 million people. If we put at least two folks in each home, we’d be set. Renovations pending, of course…

This isn’t to say that housing in Germany is an easy problem to solve. It’s to show that the problem looks differently than I had originally imagined. I was looking at it like a graph in a two-dimensional plane: Build more houses, cover more people. Every time I saw an article about Germany failing yet again to meet its annual construction target of 400,000 units—we built only 251,000 in 2024—I nodded and said, “Look, there’s the problem.” But actually, the graph leading us to the solution of this challenge lives in an eight-, nine-, who-knows-how-many-dimensional space. There are different arrows pointing in all kinds of directions—and the first two, number of people and number of apartments, are the least relevant in helping us find the target.

Now that I’ve admitted this, I can have a better conversation about the subject. Not a perfect one, by any means, but hey, better is what counts.

You won’t always think twice of your own accord. But when life and friends point you to a new view, try not to knock away their hand. Do it on your own time, but go there. Find one extra angle. It might be the one you’ll end up living in—and who knew there were so many spaces ready to house our minds?

Ever since I started publicly tracking what I read on Goodreads, I’ve mostly stuck to their five-star rating system for reviews. It’s easy! I finish a title, I hit the stars, I’m done. This is efficient but unsatisfying.

It’s not that any of my 65 followers on there are desperately craving for Nik’s next book review. It’s unsatisfying because it’s important to me to do a book justice. If I, as a writer, who has written actual books, can’t cobble together a few paragraphs to properly process, appreciate, and communicate someone else going through the same, momentous effort to create a book, then who can? Plus, it helps me pull my own thoughts together in a way that lets me remember the book for the long run.

Sometimes, I get lucky. A four-star book like The Million-Dollar, One-Person Business makes it easy enough to just type and hit send. But for five-star books and literary classics? Phew. I spent the last 30 minutes thinking about Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, and I still don’t know where to start. I’m not sure I’ll ever find a system that’ll allow me to review everything I read without eating up all of my own writing time. I’m trying, but when in doubt, I prefer defaulting to “stars only” than to put out half-assed reviews that make great books seem like anything less than they are.

This whole conundrum and many others like it are part of the “you’re an adult now” starter kit: You can never do justice to everything you touch, so all you’re left with is consciously deciding what you’ll neglect and where you’ll be uncompromisable. It’s okay, my friend. We’re all burdened by this tradeoff many times over. Ultimately, getting out of it with some sense of contentment comes down to little more than trying to choose well and adjusting as you go.

Do justice in the right places, and you won’t have anything to judge yourself for in the end.

I don’t care too much about productivity apps, but in late 2023, I found one I really loved, mostly because it had everything: a to-do list, background music, a timer, a gamified points and ranking system, and even a community chat to occasionally share whatever was on your mind. It was called Sukha.

I used the app every day and got pretty involved in the community. Sadly, it went downhill from when I joined. They moved the standalone app into the browser, completely changed the user interface, and many bugs started happening. It was a classic case of engineer’s disease: trying to fix something that’s not broken and making it worse in the process.

Eventually, I got fed up enough to start looking for alternatives. There was no shortage of them. Well, productivity tools in general, that is. With one search, you can find hundreds of Pomodoro timers, focus music apps, and to-do list tools. Finding one that combines all the features I wanted was a bit trickier. Eventually, I decided to give LifeAt a try.

LifeAt was available as a standalone app, which is nice when you’re trying to have your virtual work headquarters somewhere other than lost in the million tabs you already have open in your browser. It had beautiful backgrounds, sounds, timed tasks, and so on. There was also a community with a handful of chat rooms, and they boasted four million users. So I gave the free trial a go.

I still can’t 100% put my finger on why, but despite the beautiful design and flawless features, but after a few days of using LifeAt, I felt…nothing. Absolutely nothing. I had no connection to the app. No interest in using it. It was like a leaf lying somewhere on my terrace: If the wind carried it away any moment, I would not have cared at all.

One thing I did notice was that the chat rooms felt empty. On-screen, they had thousands of members. But no one shared anything. The only room where I could even get a response was one that consisted exclusively of high school students studying for exams—and even then it took a day to get a single answer. I soon abandoned ship in search of greener pastures.

After LifeAt, I looked at multiple other solutions. They all looked and felt more or less the same: beautiful but uninteresting. Eventually, I gave up on most of my requirements and settled on a tool called Flocus. Not because it was great, but because it covered the essentials: an on-screen timer that I can set to be as long as I estimate my task to be, along with a list of other, upcoming to-dos.

Having traveled around the productivity app space and back again once more, my number one takeaway was this: Soulless software is everywhere. We are now drowning in a sea of beautiful apps that make us feel nothing yet keep us tapping buttons and paying our subscription charges. The more I think about it, the more examples I can find. And this is to say nothing of the software spaces I’m less familiar with, like those for design, coding, making music, process management, and so on. If you’re experienced in either of these, perhaps you’ve noticed the same.

For many of the apps I looked at, I couldn’t even find who made it. After much digging, I’d end up at some blandly named “venture studio” in Canada—probably an agency firing out apps by the truckload, hoping one will go viral to then charge for the premium features—or an anonymous Twitter account with no posts in the past month.

I’m sure it’s not the only part, but that aspect I can’t and never will knock Sukha for: The community was the best in the business. Just real people doing real work and sharing their wins and frustrations along the way. One was a freelance designer. Another doing his PhD. Someone was trying to make it as a writer. It was the most water cooler chat I’ve had since water cooler chat stopped being a thing, at least for us remote workers.

Whatever you’re building, whether it runs on code, trumpets, or heated floors: Remember that it also runs, first and foremost, on people. Make sure it has some soul to keep the gang together.

Friends from the UK were in town. They brought my fiancée and I a stellar gift: A beautiful tin box full of Ben’s Cookies.

I ate my first Ben’s Cookie in 2008 while doing an internship near London with my best friend. We both still remember it. Baked the same way since starting from an iconic red shop in Oxford’s covered market in 1984, these cookies are just the perfect mix of gooey, crunchy, and flavorful without tasting overpowering.

Yet, for some reason, you can only find them in the UK and a few select locations worldwide. Ergo, a stellar gift for a couple living in Munich with no access to these bad boys. The red, Christmas-themed box with its beautiful white lettering is a marvel all on its own. But of course, the eight stars of the show were inside. There’s milk chocolate, double chocolate, triple chocolate, even variants with macadamia, peanuts, and more.

The next day, we were invited to other friends’ house. We didn’t have a good gift to bring, and I knew our hosts loved cookies. So we brought two of Ben’s. It definitely felt like a sacrifice at first. Were we really going to hand over a quarter of our special treat to someone else? But as soon as everyone popped a piece of a cookie into their mouth at the dinner table, the real lesson was clear: The best way to make presents last is to share them.

Now, our friends also know about Ben’s Cookies. They might look for them when they next go to the UK. Who knows? Maybe they’ll give them to more friends as a gift. And then they can tell them the story: “You know, the first time I ate these, friends brought them to our house, and…”

Sorrow shared may be sorrow cut in half, but a gift shared could turn into a gift doubled—even if, like a great cookie, it ends up disappearing entirely in the process.

For plenty of good things in life, it’s actually enough. Catching up with our neighbors, for example. We live in a big apartment building. Few people know each other really well. Folks move in and out all the time. But once a year, the community hosts a mini Christmas market right outside our house. It’s perfect!

Cheap mulled wine. Grilled sausages. And a catch-up. “Is your mother still in Venetia?” “When’s your wedding?” We chatted for a good two hours. What happened throughout the year. New building plans in our area. Which restaurants are a must-try. And then, we went our separate ways.

I have this running joke with an old friend. Every time we meet, I say, “See you next year!” when we part. And almost every time, it turns out to be correct. It used to make me a little sad. Now, I’ve accepted it. It’s okay, you know? What an achievement if you have 5, 10, perhaps even 20 friends whom you see every year! Isn’t that enough?

Your favorite restaurant. A holiday spot you like visiting again and again. That timeless movie or old connection you long to spend more time with. If once a year is all you get, then once a year is how you make the most of it. And who knows? Perhaps it’s because you only experience it once a year that it’s still special after all this time.

Don’t turn special into ordinary. Presence is most keenly felt in absence—and what greater presents to receive than the ones we look forward to all year?

12 years ago, I went to Japan for the first time with a friend. I loved everything about the trip and wanted to come back ever since.

My favorite memory among many great ones is how, on our last night, we ran through Tokyo’s massive subway network with a paper map, trying to find the spot where we had bought korot, heavenly wrapped crêpes filled with cream, banana, and chocolate sauce, a few days earlier. It was an amazing dessert, and we just had to get some more before we left.

I’ll never forget that day. It was one heck of an adventure. It also taught me about “omotenashi,” the Japanese art of “wholehearted hospitality,” when the two ladies manning the shop gave us a whole bunch of korots for free becausze they were closing and we only had euros, no yen.

That day also started a clock: When would I get to eat korot again? The delicacy was not only not available in Europe, let alone Germany—it wasn’t even a thing outside of Tokyo. And I didn’t know where to begin in making it myself. But for the next few years, I kept the memory of them close to my chest.

It’s funny how, sometimes, you know what you want, but you don’t go after it. I knew I wanted to go back to Japan as soon as I left. I don’t know why it took me 12 years to do so. There wasn’t a particular reason I had to wait that long. But there was also no particular reason to return, so maybe I felt I lacked the excuse—nor did I realize I didn’t need one. Alas, life had other plans for me. Still, korots popped into my head every now and then. I only wrote about the experience and omotenashi two years ago.

Naturally, the dessert was high on my list when I finally returned. In a wonderful twist of fate, I found some right in the first subway station I walked into once I got to Tokyo. I was excited but also worried: What if they didn’t taste the same? What if I had overblown their taste in my memory? I bought some, shared them with my fiancée, and we took a bite. Heaven. It still tasted the same. Just as fluffy, just as wonderful—and entirely worth the wait.

I’m happy that my korot repeat turned out well. Sometimes, you form expectations so high, the future that meets them feels like it’s already surpassing what you hoped for. More importantly, however, my 12-year-wait taught me that the best part of eating it again is not whether a meal tastes as well as you remember it. It’s the looking forward to the experience, regardless of how it turns out. In my case, I got 12 years of joyful anticipation. In the end, those were worth more than either crêpe.

Collect memories. Revisit them. But most of all, look forward to looking forward to things. Hope is the best prize of all.