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.
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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