Essays on memory, identity, and the unspoken parts of being human.
The Price of Free I read the terms and conditions today. Actually read them. All forty-seven pages. It took three hours. By page twelve, I understood: I’m not the customer. I’m the product being sold. My wife found me staring at my phone with an expression she couldn’t quite identify. “What’s wrong?” “Did you know
I spent twenty minutes crafting a caption for my coffee photo this morning. “Brewing thoughts, one cup at a time. Perfect. Clever. Thirty-seven likes within an hour. Then my colleague asked what I was thinking about, and I said, “Nothing much.” The wit I perform online evaporates in actual conversation. My wife noticed this months
I have the ability to speak to the entire world. Right now. From this phone in my hand. I could write something, press send, and potentially reach millions of people. Billions, theoretically. Yesterday, I used this power to post a picture of my sandwich. “Turkey on rye. Living my best life. Eleven likes. My father
I refreshed the feed again. Nothing new. Same posts, same faces, same endless scroll. But I couldn’t stop checking. What if I missed something? My wife looked over. “Still scrolling?” “Just checking.” “For what?” I didn’t have an answer. What was I checking for? News I needed to know? Updates that mattered? Something that would
I remember when prayer felt like conversation. Not hope whispered into silence. Not words offered to uncertainty. Actual conversation with someone who listened, who answered, who was as real as my father sitting across the breakfast table. I was seven. God was everywhere. Faith was easy. Now I’m forty-three. And I don’t know what I
I spend hours thinking about Jannah. What it will look like. What reunions will feel like. The peace. The perfection. The eternal rest after this difficult dunya. But yesterday, my neighbor knocked on my door asking for help moving furniture. I said I was busy. I wasn’t busy. I was reading about Paradise. My wife
The fear of losing parents hits you while watching your father struggle with the TV remote. His fingers, once steady enough to thread fishing lines in the dark, now shake slightly as he searches for the power button. This parental death anxiety becomes unbearably real – someday, probably sooner than you want to admit, he won’t be here.
Sharing favorite songs is emotional strip poker—each track turns over a hidden card. This is music taste psychology in practice: what we love in sound reveals our interior weather, the hopes and hurts we rarely name. The risk of sending the song is the risk of being known.
At 2 AM on insomnia forums, strangers confess: they’re all pretending to be human. A woman from Tokyo, a man from São Paulo—both admitting the same intimate secret nobody speaks aloud.
In a world obsessed with constant movement, we often lose sight of the present. While observing a man sharing a simple meal on a busy pavement, I realized that true peace isn’t found in what we accumulate, but in our ability to simply be. These are three profound lessons on finding stillness amidst the chaos.
For thirty-something years, I’ve been treating mystery like a problem that needs solving. Every big question—about God, about life, about death—I approached like a puzzle. But sitting there, looking at Arash’s face, I realized: I don’t know. And that felt like relief.
I tried to remember my mother’s voice yesterday. I couldn’t. This scared me more than anything has scared me in years. She died three years ago. I remember her face clearly. Her hands. The way she walked. But her voice? It slips away like water through fingers. I reach for it. It’s not there. This
“These words found the feelings I couldn’t name.”
“Like finding letters I wrote to myself but never sent.”
“Writing that makes you stop and remember what it means to be alive.”
Curated insights, thoughtfully delivered. No clutter.
