Spinning and Other Existential Mistakes Last Friday night, a terrifying existential insight struck me – and it happened during an already terrifying activity: spinning class. Across from me, the fitness coach was cycling with a hypnotizingly equal cadence. All around, gym-goers were dripping sweat, electrolytes and dignity. And just when I thought the cardio was approaching its grand finale, my heart rate took an unauthorized swerve upwards. “There is only one really serious philosophical problem,” Albert Camus once thought – and that is the question of whether life is worth living. ...
In A Lover’s Discourse, my boy Roland Barthes describes the miserable trap of interpreting signs: But for me, an amorous subject, everything which is new, everything which disturbs, is received not as a fact but in the aspect of a sign which must be interpreted […] If the other has given me this new telephone number, what was that the sign of? Was it an invitation to telephone right away, for the pleasure of the call, or only should the occasion arise, out of necessity? ...
It’s December 23rd, I’m waiting for my plane to take off from the Paris CDG airport, lifting me towards my hometown for the Christmas holidays. “Girl you sweet like Fanta, Fanta” is banging in my AirPods for about 15 seconds before I anxiously switch to another short musical blurb, and then another. Whenever I find myself in a particular state of mind, when my thoughts are short, uneasy, frantically jumping from one to the other, inevitably, my Spotify playlist follows. ...
Sorry to trouble you was how the note began, which is such a great opener. Please, trouble me! Trouble me! I’ve been waiting my whole life to be troubled by a note like this! The very first lines of Miranda July’s second novel All Fours quickly got under my skin. It was early February of 2025 and while I was in a bookstore in Wellington, New Zealand, I was carefully reading the first pages all books that made the finals of my pre-selection process. All Fours’s beginning most intensely left me wanting more. ...
Would Kierkegaard say Roland Barthes Was Anxiously Attached? In reflecting on the Adorable, the unique quality that draws us to our objects of desire, 20th-century French theorist Roland Barthes writes in A Lover’s Discourse: Herein a great enigma, to which I shall never possess the key: Why is it that I desire So-and-so? Why is it that I desire So-and-so lastingly, longingly? Or to paraphrase it the way Sex and the City protagonist Carrie Bradshaw would have said it: I couldn’t help but wonder… Why am I utterly and ridiculously obsessed with Mr. Big? ...
You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything writes Greg McKeown in Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. Sure, practically everything is unimportant, yet virtually most things have a formidable way of overwhelming me and convincing me of their Targaryenesque birthright to be on top of my to-do list. Just a few days ago I was cooking at home and almost without noticing, I was mentally going through all of the projects I had to focus on in the coming months. My anxiety was growing as my thoughts were physically bouncing on and off emails I had to write, books I wanted to read, and even bigger musings such as who I wanted to become. Did I want to be a teacher, or work in tech, or organize kids summer camps in Bulgaria? Then, let’s throw in the mix the 23 podcast episodes I have saved to listen to, blog article ideas, wanting to adopt a dog, get into woodwork, move apartments, and let us not forget my addiction to mindlessly scrolling on dating apps or refreshing WhatsApp! ...