While my dedicated sections focus on specific pillars, the Essays section is where I explore the intersections. This is a space for synthesis—where Stoicism meets artificial intelligence, or where civic duty meets personal development.
These pieces are often more exploratory, serving as intellectual sketches and deep-dives into the questions that don’t fit neatly into a single category but are essential to a well-lived life.
Every map I grew up with told the same quiet lie: that the story of this continent starts when a European ship arrives on its shore. Everything before that moment gets compressed into a kind of prehistory: vague, undated, waiting to be discovered into relevance. It’s such a natural way to tell the story that it takes real effort to notice it’s a choice, and a self-serving one. Nobody discovers a place that’s already inhabited. You only get to call it discovery if you’ve first decided the people living there don’t fully count.
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For much of the post–Cold War era, the Arctic was held up as the one place great-power rivals still cooperated: search and rescue, fisheries, scientific monitoring, the kind of work that doesn’t function unless everyone at the table shows up. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine broke that. In March 2022, the seven other Arctic Council members — the U.S., Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden — suspended their participation rather than sit across from Moscow.1 Russia has spent the years since trying to build a substitute reality: hosting its own forums, leaning harder on a partnership with China, and treating Arctic diplomacy less as shared stewardship than as a stage for proving it isn’t isolated.
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Donald Trump didn’t invent American interest in Greenland, but he did put it on billboards. In August 2019, after Denmark’s prime minister called the idea of selling the island “absurd,” he canceled a planned state visit and posted a meme of a gold Trump Tower Photoshopped into a Greenlandic coastal town, captioned “I promise not to do this to Greenland!”1 It read, at the time, as a punchline: the kind of story that gets a segment on late-night television and then quietly disappears. I wrote about it that way in the original version of this piece.
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I’m not chasing a fantasy of elsewhere. I’m chasing a better use of my remaining time. Albania keeps coming up because it offers something I can’t seem to buy in the States at any reasonable price: a quieter life that still feels alive.
What I want is simple. I want mornings that begin with a short walk to coffee, not a long drive to errands. I want a budget that buys time (time to write, read, and call the people I love) rather than buying square footage I barely use. I want streets that reward curiosity, not speed. Albania, from Tirana’s café lanes to the Adriatic towns, looks like a place built for human pace.
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