Fluent in both languages: system and soul.
It half worked, which is the interesting part. This whole blog lives in that gap: you can be clever about soul stuff. Bring structure, sometimes data, sometimes even AI, to the soft things in a life, without losing what makes them soft. There is real value in both directions. It can also tip into hiding in the head, so every piece here marks the spot where it does.
The things that matter less get the real tools. The ones that matter most are left to chance, or get the wrong ones.
Optimization was never the enemy. Optimization-as-armor is.
I live in Zurich. By trade I help companies build AI systems and growth engines, over a hundred of them in twenty years. The tools I learned there were made to build billion-dollar companies: we obsess over every little detail to optimize a metric. And the one thing that work taught me: what drives people is not the intellect, not the system, not even what is right. It is human psychology.
In my own life I met the opposite. The inner things, love, inner peace, happiness, the soul if you like, were handed to me in cryptic, intangible ways. The most important things in life are often the soft ones, and we leave them to chance, while the things that matter less get the real tools. Why not use some of those tools to help us? Not for everything. But sometimes it can be bridged, especially for people like me, who think in systems and are fluent in Python, Excel and processes. Maybe you too.
Not everything we feel needs to be analyzed. But not everything we feel should be left to chance.
Nothing is published yet. These four are next, in this order. Subscribers get each one the day it is out.
I built a system for my inner life, and it worked: insight after insight, none of it felt. This essay is about what came next: using smart tools to live well, and also feeling it, in the body, in the emotions, in a deeper kind of satisfaction.
in developmentUnderstanding a feeling is a very good way to never feel it. You get real insight and nothing changes. How the trap works, and the ways out that let it land.
in developmentOne text file about you that you hand to ChatGPT or Claude, so the AI stops starting from zero every time: your patterns, what helps, what you have already figured out. You can start it tonight, no coding. And the honest part: when writing about a feeling turns into a way of not feeling it.
in developmentBreath work, psychedelics, therapy, discipline: what each one actually does for you, and what it cannot. Evidence first, tested on myself, no incense.
in developmentThe world of inner work is split into two camps that don’t talk to each other. On one side: clinical literature, rigorous, evidence-based, and emotionally sterile. On the other: spiritual content, warm, embodied, and allergic to precision. Analytical people bounce off both.
Your analytical nature is not the obstacle. Used well, it is the vehicle. Used blindly, it becomes the cage. This blog explores both, honestly: systems, and sometimes even AI, in service of a better life, the cognitive parts and the embodied parts, both worlds.
A system is a group of interacting, interrelated, or interdependent elements that work together to form a unified whole and perform a specific purpose.
Here that means the things you can build and run again: a routine, a spreadsheet, a checklist, or the prompt you hand to an AI together with your notes. Steps that hold together and do a job.
In religion and philosophy, the soul is the immaterial aspect or essence of a living being.
Here: the inner things. Love, inner peace, happiness, what moves you.
Put together: use the system to get to the feeling, and notice the moment it starts to replace it. That moment is what this blog is about.
When does the framework help you get to the feeling? And when does it become a defense against it?
I think in systems. I love systems. I build them for a living, and people spent years telling me to leave all of that at the door of anything that mattered. They were mostly wrong: someone like me does not reach the soul by abandoning the head. I need a route in, and structure is the route.
Once, they were right. I had built an elegant self-reflection system, and it was working: insight after insight, all of it true, none of it felt. What finally got me through the door was not a better framework. It was not one method either. I experimented with many: talking therapy, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), deep brain reorienting (DBR) and the body-level kinds, parts work (IFS), hypnosis, a headset that puts a weak current through the head, even going into things that happened before my birth, and a long list of biohacking. All of it happened in a body I had spent years successfully ignoring. Want the whole story? Essay 001 tells it: the system, the point where it stopped working, and what finally got through.
The diagnosis was correct. The verdict was wrong. You do think too much, and it was never the problem. What nobody handed you was the lines.
Type whatever is in your head into the field below. Every keystroke becomes a star. Keep typing and the sky fills up, and nothing connects. Then stop, hands off, and wait. Sometimes it takes nothing but time and rest: watch what the page does with the pile the moment you let it sit.
One honest footnote, because it cuts both ways: sometimes they were right. But thinking too little about this stuff is also not good, and just following your heart can be misleading.
The same Tuesday, told twice. On the left, how the system logged it: a spreadsheet, complete and legible, every cell accurate. On the right, what actually happened. Drag the fader and hear one voice louder than the other. Stuck in the spreadsheet, or swinging to the other extreme and throwing out every system: most of us only know those two. This blog is about the bridge between them.
Far left, every rule holds and nothing moves: a perfect grid, the optimized week, the feelings neatly filed. Far right, nothing holds and everything moves: the flood, the spiral, the year that dissolves. In between there is a narrow band where the dots start flowing together into shapes. Researchers who study complex systems call that narrow band the edge of chaos, and argue that systems, brains included, work best there. In a life it looks like this: enough routines and systems that you don’t fall apart, enough room that something can still surprise you. Drag the dial and see where that is.
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One sentence from this blog, new every day. Take it into the day.
Essays, a few times a month, each with something you can use: the mechanism, my personal take, one thing to try this week. If any of this landed: this is for you.
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A system can capture, structure, and remember. It cannot feel anything for you. Every essay here ends with a section by this name, because every method has limits, and pretending it has none is how smart people hide inside it.
That includes the instruments above. If you have been sliding that fader for ten minutes, the fader is now the defense. You already know what to do:
Close the laptop. Let it sink in.