I read Marc Bloch’s Feudal Society for my yearlong book club on the development of the nation state, and the biggest takeaway is how tightly linked peace and development are. It sounds obvious but rarely do we see such a civilizational decline as the beginning of the Middle Ages.

When Rome collapsed, the Carolingian Empire rose up as a weaker, one-man (Charlemagne) attempt at continuation. It lacked the institutional depth of the Roman Empire, and coupled with the invasions of the Vikings from the north, Hungarians from the east, and Muslims from the South, it couldn’t maintain power.

Some networks remained like the city states along the Mediterranean, the Catholic Church, of course, and the Byzantine Empire, which survived for a thousand more years.

The first feudal age according to Bloch (roughly 860-1050) started after the fall of Charlemagne, when Europe became highly fragmented. It was a period of extreme instability and violence, which led to a declining population. Bridges and roads broke down, coin usage—and with it, trade—collapsed.

Towns and villages turned inward (often to local strong men) to protect themselves from chaos. This isolation forced each small community to rely on its own resources and customs, most went back to the very basic governance system of kinship. People depended precariously on subsistence farming (one frost and many would starve). Written laws fell into oblivion as most people became illiterate. Law became an oral tradition of custom, different from each village to the other.

Slowly, things changed.

Eventually, the Muslims were driven out of Spain. The Vikings integrated into the lands they had conquered (most of the UK and northern France). The Hungarians settled in the territory that now bears their name.

The “Peace of God” and the “Truce of God”, which prohibited war on holy days and protected civilians from war, were instituted by the Church around the 11th century to curb the rampant violence of the era.

The “second feudal age” (around 1050–1200) saw the beginnings of demographic recovery and commercial expansion. There was also a cultural renaissance as old Roman and Muslim works were translated. The study of Roman Law was revived in universities like Bologna.

It wasn’t until then, when peace grew, when nobles were able to focus on administration instead of warfare.

Increased trade brought a flow of coin and precious metals back into Europe. This allowed rulers to stop paying officials with land (fiefs) and start using money wages to hire a loyal, salaried bureaucracy.

Burgesses (bourgeois in French) became an important social class of professionals and merchants. They became frustrated by predatory local lords and often sought protection from monarchic governments. This alliance helped central authorities regain a monopoly on order and justice.

After four centuries of fragmentation, power gradually consolidated into larger kingdoms, each developing its own bureaucracy and, slowly, its own national identity.

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Trust between strangers is foundational for civilization

The Roman Empire at its peak held a monopoly on violence which made complex civilization possible. It produced the physical infrastructure: roads, bridges, coins. More importantly, it produced the institutional infrastructure: law, contracts, enforceable agreements across distance. Together these created the conditions for commerce, which enabled specialization, which enabled everything else we call “civilization”.

These are public goods: things no individual actor produces on their own but everyone benefits from. And they require a dominant power to exist at all. Safe trade routes, standardized weights and measures, rule of law, none of these are maintained in a vacuum. They are the byproduct of hegemony.

The underlying logic is a reinforcing cycle: a monopoly on violence creates the institutional trust that enables commerce between strangers, commerce generates surplus, surplus funds stronger institutions and wider enforcement, which expand the radius of trust.

When the Roman Empire fell, the physical and institutional infrastructure collapsed with it and you got political fragmentation and erosion of trust, exactly what happened in the first feudal age.

Trade requires that strangers honor agreements, and that requires a power capable of enforcing them at distance. When that power disappears, you go back to subsistence economies and local strongmen.

Pax Americana

Is it a coincidence that the last 80 years—which have been the most prosperous in history—the period of globalization, of international rule of law, of deep economic integration, of innovation, happened during the Pax Americana?

Many love to hate the US—and the record is far from clean—but it’s largely because of American values and institutions that the world was able to develop as rapidly as it did, to integrate as tightly as it has.

I’m not talking about the absence of wars, there have been big wars (Vietnam, Korea, Iraq) but they’ve been more regional than global. Yet the US built and maintained specific institutions that reduced transaction costs and enabled the most rapid reduction in global poverty in human history: the dollar as reserve currency, US Navy guaranteeing sea lanes, or WTO dispute resolution.

The hegemon provides the scaling condition. The Roman Empire at its largest stretched from Britain to Egypt and Mesopotamia. It was the largest integrated political and economic space the Western world had seen, but it was always regional. At the same time, Han China dominated East Asia, the Parthian Empire controlled Mesopotamia, and the Kushans Central Asia. Linked by tenuous long-distance trade, each civilization operating largely within its own orbit.

What the US underwrote after World War II was the ability to scale and integrate all of the regional systems into a single global order. That had never existed before.

Now we’re seeing the fissures in a world order most of us took for granted, especially those of us from the West. The Roman and Carolingian collapses ended in centuries of fragmentation and violence. I don't think that's where we're headed, but there are some things I’m thinking about.

The erosion of the rules-based order

The institutions that were created after 1945 have lost legitimacy. Some because they have genuinely been co-opted. Remember when the WHO's director-general cut short a live interview rather than answer a question about Taiwan's exclusion?

Others, like the UN, read like satire at this point. Saudi Arabia chairing the UN Commission on the Status of Women, or literally a few days ago the UN Economic and Social Council nominated Iran to the committee that coordinates its programs on human rights, women's rights, and counter-terrorism. This is not a joke.

The weaponization of SWIFT during the Russian invasion of Ukraine has also made non-aligned countries wary of the “neutrality” of the institutions.

The rules-based order is as effective as the belief in the institutions that sustain it. Now, we see many countries openly defying them or simply not taking them into consideration.

The return of realpolitik

As the global institutional infrastructure weakens, raw power fills the vacuum. This is the natural state of things, just look at human history. What was unusual was this period of relative stability where countries didn’t need brute force because external institutions maintained order. That period seems to be closing.

Putin's invasion of Ukraine was the first large-scale territorial conquest of a recognized European state since WWII. Trump’s comments about taking Greenland and the Panama Canal, whatever you think of them, normalize the idea that borders are negotiable if you're strong enough to take them.

Violence and force are reasserting themselves as the primary currency of international relations.

Fragmentation and then multipolarity

What came after the decline of the Roman and Carolingian Empires was fragmentation. What comes after US hegemony will be a reorganization.

The US will not disappear, it will consolidate its own sphere: the Americas, likely Japan and Australia. Europe faces its defining choice: remain America's ally (which seems less and less likely), or build the military and economic muscle to stand on its own, especially against Russia.

China won’t replace the US as global hegemon. China is (and has always been) inward-looking. It will transact with whoever is willing, build strategic self-reliance, and expand economic influence without exporting ideology. China doesn’t care about the political structure of its trading partners, unlike the US which has always pushed for liberalism.

India will rise further and become a major pole. Nigeria, Indonesia, and the rest of the Global South won't cleanly choose sides. They will play all sides, pursuing self-interest through shifting alliances based on whoever offers the best terms at any given moment.

A multipolar world order is the likely outcome. An unstable one at that. Competing powers with expanding spheres of influence, with no dominant enforcer and no shared institutional framework.

The decline of Western ideals

This is the deepest loss for me.

Western ideals have been something genuinely new in history. The Enlightenment’s bet on reason, individual dignity, free speech, limited government, and the belief that human beings can organize their collective life through arguments rather than force produced the most prosperous, free, and peaceful societies in human history.

We assumed that this was the end of history, that all states to come would choose liberal democracy and capitalism and integrate into this global order. Then China came along and said nah man, I’m good. Its accession to the WTO in 2001 was based on the assumption that commercial integration would produce political liberalization. Instead China became the world’s largest manufacturer while consolidating authoritarian control.

As I discuss in “China is Eating the World”, other illiberal countries watched China’s rise and drew their own conclusions. You can have development without democracy. You can have order without liberalism.

But I feel the deeper threat is internal. A generation of critical theory and identity politics has captured universities, media, and cultural institutions. The Western tradition is now taught as a system of oppression rather than the foundation of the very liberties that make the critique possible.

That’s the irony. You can only accuse the West of failing its ideals by accepting those ideals as the standard. Free speech, free inquiry, institutional pluralism are what allow the critique to exist at all. And they’re exactly what’s being targeted.

The people most protected by liberal institutions are working hardest to dismantle them. We’re throwing out the baby with the bathwater. And while Western societies argue about their own foundations, illiberal models are quietly gaining credibility everywhere else.

Liberalism doesn’t need to be perfect to be worth defending. It needs to be better than the alternatives. And I see the alternatives—the CCP in China, Islam’s dogmatic militance in the Middle East and North Africa, socialist populism in Latin America, military coups in Sub-Saharan Africa—and none of them have produced societies I'd want to live in.

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What comes next

Bloch wrote Feudal Society while trying to make sense of a world coming apart. He was executed by the Gestapo in 1944, never seeing what came after.

We’re luckier.

What Bloch understood is that civilization is not the default state of human affairs. Violence is. The first feudal age is the reminder of what the default looks like: violence, scarcity, a life bounded by whoever is strongest near you.

Every transition looks like an ending. And yet, every time the order has collapsed, humans have rebuilt. The collapse of Roman order produced feudalism, which eventually produced the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, liberal democracy, and us.

Today, the stability of the past 80 years is shifting, the institutions are cracking, and the values that built them are being openly contested.

Civilizational transitions, as chaotic as they might be, are also the moments when new things get built. That’s what I want to explore next.

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It’s 4:50 am. I’m in bed, wide awake, and I’m feeling overwhelmed again. I feel time is passing by so fast, my to-do list grows and grows and I barely close any open loops.

With that overwhelm, my anxiety grows and my coping mechanism kicks in: procrastination. Which makes me feel even worse because I actively avoid the things I need to do.

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And in the dark, with nothing to distract me, the stories start. Basically: you’re a failure, you’re lazy, you are a person who doesn’t follow through. Harsh, I know, and especially dramatic. But that is what I kept telling myself. And so each task becomes impossibly difficult to accomplish because it becomes a reflection of all my deficiencies.

It’s interesting that a heightened level of distress causes such irrational, unhelpful and frankly self-sabotaging behavior.

What if, when facing this overwhelm, I told myself a different story: Ok Santi, it’s go time. List all the items that need resolving, prioritize them based on urgency and complexity, and start. Don’t overthink it. Just start.

Minute by minute, hour by hour, I would close each open loop. The overwhelm would fade, my sense of control and accomplishment would increase, and my anxiety would disappear. I would realize that this wasn’t a reflection of me or my insecurities, this was simply a lot of tasks that needed my attention—and coupled with big life events—they snowballed.

Writing, thank God, allows me to see myself with more distance. I can analyze myself and see that yes, I’m going through the beginning of an anxious episode that needs to be nipped in the bud. This seems to stem from a big move out of Bangkok back to Mexico City after four years of living abroad. Four years of intense travel, of thinking about where to settle, and now back in the city I grew up in. Looking for a house, restarting a surrogacy process, which is its own universe of emotions (I get to be a dad soon!). Managing family dynamics, dealing with allergies and the smog of Mexico City.

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On the other hand, I started the year with loads of very big goals that were not broken into digestible bits that could be addressed each day. So my goal of “Grow my presence on social media” is broad and general, and feels insurmountable each time I revisit it. The same goes for “Start third space/social club.” Pretty vague. I need to do the work of clarifying what these actually mean.

But this is not all about clarity. It’s mostly about doing, and in the doing I’ll get the information I need to keep going and finish. I need to understand my presence on Substack but I mostly just need to write cool, interesting essays that scratch the intellectual or creative itch I have. That in itself is the work. And yes, I need to have a plan on how to tackle my goal “Publish my sci-fi novel by December,” but I also need to just finish writing it.

The analogy I think of is that of a shower head (and I’m actually thinking of this because I need to clean mine). Each individual hole is a project, the water is the creative force and the limescale that accumulates is the procrastination, the emotional barriers, the blocks. Some get completely clogged. In others the water gets by but it’s just a sad little stream that barely gets you wet. It’s lost its potency and vigor.

So every couple of months we all need to clean the damned shower head and chip away at the limescale so our productive and creative juices can once again be restored.

I’m simultaneously cutting myself some slack while holding myself more responsible for the outcomes. We are the stories we tell ourselves. And I know I’m a pretty capable, intelligent guy. I know that a lot of these things on my to-do list are simple and can be tackled in less than a week. And I know that the bigger projects are achievable and exciting, that’s why I chose them. I just need to stop procrastinating, stop wallowing in my overwhelm, stop second-guessing myself and start.

Start writing. Continue the novel. Have the difficult talk.

My favorite definition of anxiety is: anxiety = uncertainty + fear. And right now I can see both clearly. The uncertainty: will the surrogacy work, will I find a house, will the novel be any good, will anyone read what I write? The fear: that I’ll put in the work and it won’t be enough. That at 35, time goes by so fast.

So make things certain. Clarify them, break them down, add timeframes and measurable results, make them tangible. Replace the fear with wonder. Yes, a lot of things can go wrong but what if they go right? What if the ambitious goals actually happen?

These are important things that need to be addressed but also, what about some perspective? I’m a sentient being living on a beautiful, complex planet with people I love and who love me back. I get the privilege of deciding my own goals and aspirations while having a healthy capable body and a sound mind1. And as I write this (it’s now 5:31 am) I feel the soft fuzzy hair of the cat sleeping next to me, and I hear the calm breath of the love of my life on the same bed.

How can I for a second doubt myself? Doubt the gifts I have and the gifts I want to share? How can I doubt that I can achieve great things?

I want them. I deserve them. And I will do the work to achieve them.

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Happy first day of 2026. I went to sleep at 1:04 am after zero glasses of champagne and too much scrolling on Zillow. New year, new goals, and yes—

I’m starting yet another book club:

A book club about the development (invention?) of the nation-state. I want to answer the question: how did the nation-state become the only way we organize political life at scale?

We take for granted that the world is divided into countries with fixed borders, passports, and exclusive citizenship. But this is a recent creation, roughly 200 years old. Before it, people organized differently. Authority overlapped. You could owe allegiance to multiple powers: a local lord, a king, the Pope. Empires had to manage diverse cultures and peoples, instead of demanding homogeneity. Your identity was tied to your local village and your local customs.

The nation-state was constructed through violence, bureaucracy, and deliberate cultural engineering. It wasn’t inevitable. It competed against alternatives and won. Then it was imposed globally.

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The arc:

Choosing only 12 books to answer such a big question is always hard (and subjective) but here’s my attempt after too many Reddit threads, too much debating with ChatGPT, and too many Wikipedia rabbit holes.

Before asking how the nation-state was built, you have to notice you're inside one. That’s what the first book does well. Then, we’ll read about Medieval Europe, the Ottoman Empire, Chinese statecraft, the French Revolution, the founding of the USA, the invention of national identity, people escaping state control in the mountains of Southeast Asia, and finally where we are now.

The order isn’t strictly chronological. It’s designed to unsettle first, go deep into history second, and speculate last.

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The books:

1. January: James C. Scott — Seeing Like a State. What states do: make legible, standardize, control

2. February: Marc Bloch — Feudal Society. Medieval Europe before the state: overlapping jurisdictions, multiple allegiances

3. March: Hendrik Spruyt — The Sovereign State and Its Competitors. Why the nation-state won against city-states and leagues

4. April: Karen Barkey — Empire of Difference. The Ottoman alternative: managing diversity

5. May: Dingxin Zhao — The Confucian-Legalist State. Chinese centralization, 1,800 years before Europe

6. June: Alexis de Tocqueville — The Old Regime and the Revolution. How France destroyed local autonomy

7. July: Alexander Hamilton et al — The Federalist Papers. The American alternative: fragmentation

8. August: Benedict Anderson — Imagined Communities. Building nationalism

9. September: Eugen Weber — Peasants into Frenchmen. How France manufactured Frenchmen

10. October: James C. Scott — The Art of Not Being Governed. How people escape state control

11. November: Hedley Bull — The Anarchical Society. Are we returning to medieval-style fragmentation?

12. December: James Dale Davidson & William Rees-Mogg — The Sovereign Individual. Technology shifts power from states to individuals

Why it matters:

We're living through a strange moment. The nation-state's grip seems to be both loosening and tightening. On one side: digital nomads, remote work, competitive jurisdictions, network states, platform governance, the EU's growing power over its members. On the other: the rise of nationalism, crackdowns on immigration, backlash against tourism, borders hardening again. Understanding how the current order was built is the first step to imagining what might replace it, or what it might become.

To recap: one book a month, starting with Seeing Like a State today. And I'll publish my take on each book by month's end. Come nerd out.

postscript 📮

I'm serious, let me know if you want to join. :)

I'll start a group chat and do a Zoom call every two weeks to discuss. You can join even if you're not sure you'll read them all. Basically, let's hang out.

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I’m agnostic.

I don’t believe in any religion, sadly. I grew up Catholic, and my mother is still a devout believer. She always said the only condition is that you have faith. That’s all that matters. I’m afraid I don’t have faith. I can’t suspend my beliefs about our material world. Yet the older I get, the more I’m softening my stance. I’m more open, more attuned to how I feel, what I sense, what can’t be explained rationally. Not full-on faith perhaps, but belief in the power of our minds, in synchronicity, in the patterns that emerge when we’re paying attention.

I approach all religions with curiosity. They have been our primary way of making sense of existence. Religion and spirituality offer solace, community, humbleness, hope. Above all, they offer meaning to a world that can feel too big and too indifferent.

Throughout my trip to Bhutan a few months back, I noted small moments. I don’t know what to call them. Epiphanies feels too grandiose, coincidences too small. But each one made me sense a larger realm, more beautiful and more meaningful, dwelling within us. Waiting to be accessed.

During a chant in a temple, a married couple in front of me held hands and for a second they squeezed stronger as if communicating a shared truth or feeling. It was so touching to witness the depth of a relationship distilled in a single gesture.

On another visit to a monastery, a monk who couldn’t have been older than ten turned back mid-chant and smiled at me, I smiled back. He did it two more times, each one holding it for longer, smiling wider. It felt like a recognition of each other. A certain understanding, complicity even. I don’t know who you are or what your life has been but there are certain universal truths to our experience on this planet. I see you and you see me and we both get it.

In Thimphu, while battling with anxiety, I walked all over the city, went down to the river, and found a park. I sat on a bench that overlooked a children’s playground. A boy and a girl (siblings I assumed) came over, waved, and insisted with signs I watch them go down the slide over and over. Their mom and grandma sat on the other side of the park and waved at me. They kept looking back at me to check if I was still watching them. These children—who will grow up and live their lives in Bhutan and have families of their own—will never remember that moment at the playground, but I will. What better way to ground you when your mind is unraveling than watching children play joyously, without a care in the world, feeling the warmth of the sun on my face, listening to the river below?

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These fleeting moments felt like spiritual experiences. They happen when you connect with people at a level that transcends logic, that doesn’t make rational sense but makes felt sense. Our spiritual guide, Dorji, told us about Nagarjuna’s concept of emptiness in Buddhism. He considered emptiness not as void but as interconnectedness.

Interconnectedness is exactly what I felt in these moments: connected to people I’ll never see again, yet bonded through a shared experience. I felt less alone. More grateful. Awed that my body could produce this warm feeling, that I could feel love toward strangers, toward a moment, toward the very act of connection.

If this is what faith offers people—this feeling—then I get it. If more people who feel lonely and suffocated by dread could tap into this collective warmth, this energy, this love that asks nothing of us but to notice it, we would be alright.

Maybe all we want are places where connection is easier to feel. Places to slow down. To remember we’re not alone. To reframe emptiness as its opposite: everything and everyone, connected.

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postscript 📮

Happy last day of 2025! Thank you for reading, for subscribing and for giving me your most precious asset: your attention.

I published 40 essays this year. It was an absolute thrill. Here’s to 56 in 2026!

I’m doing my annual review and I have really good questions for you to reflect on:

• What is trying to emerge in me that I keep interrupting?

• What am I experiencing that I have no language for?

• What thought did I dismiss because it seemed too simple or too mine?

• What am I grieving that isn’t a death?

• What small thing do I love that the world considers unimportant?

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I missed my alarm and woke up at 3:05 am. The taxi was already waiting downstairs to leave for my 5 a.m. flight to Paro. I slept the whole way and mercifully missed the landing at one of the world’s most dangerous airports—a combination of low visibility, very tall mountains, and a narrow valley where only ~20 pilots are licensed to land.

I didn’t do any research before the trip (very unlike me) because this was my first guided trip. Around 30 people from all over the world joined Edge City Bhutan, an expedition from an organization I hold dear.

I figured I’d trust the experts to explain the place as we moved through it. And they delivered.

Bhutan has a long history of doing its own thing

Our first visit was to Rinpung Dzong, a 17th-century monastery-fortress built on a hill overlooking the Paro valley. Its central tower is surrounded by a courtyard with intricate wooden balconies. This building holds both a monastic body and Paro district’s administration.

Dzongs illustrate the ancient political philosophy of cho-sid-nyi—the dual system—where religious and secular powers share authority over the territory. This dual system originated in Tibet, spread through the Himalayan kingdoms, but now only survives in Bhutan.

Each district (Dzongkhag) in Bhutan has its own dzong to serve as the religious, military, and administrative center, so they’re still actively used by both monks and government officials. This blending of spiritual and secular life is very much a part of Bhutan’s way of life.

We visited many monasteries high in the mountains, including the world-famous Tiger’s Nest (and yes, I was guided through the steep stairs by two friends on either side like a horse with blinkers, counting to five, pretending there wasn’t a 500-meter vertical drop right next to me).

Bhutan has a distinct culture, in part driven by its inaccessibility. It is mountainous terrain with narrow valleys and very little flat land, with two behemoths as neighbors: China (Tibet) to the north and India to the south.

As such, it’s been slow to join the globalized world.

Bhutan didn’t join the UN until 1971, opened to foreign tourism in 1974 (maintaining a high-value, low-volume approach with a $100/night visa fee), and only legalized television and the internet in 1999.

Yet in the 2000s, things started to change more dramatically as King Jigme Singye Wangchuck aimed to reform the country and set the foundations for prosperity. He essentially forced democracy on a reluctant population. They adopted their first constitution in 2008 and enshrined Gross National Happiness as a guiding principle of governance instead of the more traditional Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Then we flew to Gelephu, and I saw them attempting something even more ambitious.

Gelephu Mindfulness City

Our chartered flight landed at a tiny airport right next to a massive construction site: the new Gelephu Mindfulness City (GMC) international airport. We were taken through the massive earthworks—it will be built on top of a river—and we had a more technical presentation of the airport, which is being built with Singapore’s Changi Airport International as a key partner.

We then drove to a high viewpoint to see the entire valley where the city would be built. This was the site of a new temple, one of the first buildings to go up.

GMC was announced in December 2023 and it will be a new economic hub about three times the size of Singapore right on the border with India. The master plan is designed by Bjarke Ingels Group: eleven neighborhoods organized around rivers, each designed as a mandala. Buildings will use local materials (wood, stone, and bamboo) and maintain Bhutanese vernacular architecture.

But the renders (although beautiful) aren’t the interesting part. The governance experiment is.

GMC will operate as a Special Administrative Region with its own legal framework borrowing best practices from places like Singapore (for anti-corruption) and Abu Dhabi (for global market regulations), while developing its own cultural and environmental guardrails.

The Diamond Strategy is a plan proposed by the King to control development. It uses a “One Country, Two Systems” framework, where GMC will function as a model for innovation and experimentation to attract investment and foster economic growth. Best practices piloted in the GMC could then be scaled up to the rest of the country. The strategy is designed to take place over 40 years, starting with a divergence in the first 20 years, followed by a gradual convergence back into a single system.

This is a model for leapfrog development that doesn’t mirror China or the UAE. They’re mixing culture and sustainability with development and innovation in a way that drives growth for the country but tries to curtail the riskier parts of opening to global capital markets.

This is where Edge City comes in. The organization brings together people interested in new models of governance, innovation, and community building. Timour, one of its founders, saw in Bhutan a live laboratory and invited us along to witness it firsthand. We were lucky to have people actively working on the GMC come talk to us at our hotel in Paro. Bhutan is one of the few places where those abstract ideas are being tested in public, which feels pretty rare and very cool.

The Buddhist angle

Now I don’t remember who brought this point up, but GMC is also a bet by Bhutan to become a global epicenter for Buddhism, especially Vajrayana Buddhism (the same tradition as in Tibet). Caveat: I’m not claiming they’re explicitly planning for this, but it would make sense if they were.

Here’s the situation: the Dalai Lama—by far the most famous Buddhist monk in the world—is 90 years old. In his tradition, succession requires recognizing his next incarnation. But he has been in exile since 1959. China has already declared its own Panchen Lama (traditionally involved in identifying the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation) and has made clear it intends to control the next succession. The actual Panchen Lama recognized by the Dalai Lama was taken by Chinese authorities at age six and hasn’t been seen publicly since.

What happens in the coming years when the Dalai Lama dies will fracture Tibetan Buddhism. There will likely be two competing Dalai Lamas—one recognized by China, one by the exile community.

There’s an opening here. Bhutan already has a functioning monastic order that is venerated by its population. It has legitimacy. And it has never been colonized or conquered.

GMC could become something like a Mecca for Vajrayana Buddhism—a place of pilgrimage and study. The millions of Buddhists worldwide (and the growing number of Western practitioners) might seek a spiritual center that isn’t under Beijing’s control.

How to develop without losing your identity and culture

The core tension I felt while in Bhutan, and one that GMC directly addresses, is how to modernize without becoming like everywhere else. How do you keep ancient traditions and religious practices when you open yourself to the world and are subject to the pressures of tourism and global capital markets?

Basically, how to have your cake and eat it too.

Let’s consider a normal path of development. A country opens up to the world, hoping to provide better opportunities to its citizens. Global conglomerates set up shop to sell products, extract resources, or manufacture goods. This is good. It brings what underdeveloped countries desperately need: money, jobs, and prosperity. The state is able to tax the companies (and its richer citizens) and with that money it improves infrastructure and provides better services for all.

However, a lot of the local fabric gets lost. Local shops disappear as multinational chains open up. Hotels get built and if popular, larger resorts sprout up. Tourism changes the local culture and puts enormous strains on local infrastructure.

Unintended consequences start to accumulate: commoditized labor, cultural homogenization, loss of communal values, destruction of natural resources.

Look at Bali. Thirty years ago it was a cultural treasure with rice terraces, temples, and traditional village life. Now parts of it are indistinguishable from Cancún or Phuket: traffic jams, Western party bars, and thousands of tourists clogging famous sights and beaches. Thailand faced similar pressures: Maya Bay (made famous by the movie The Beach) had to be closed for years to recover from the damage caused by mass tourism. Nepal, Bhutan’s neighbor, opened up faster and more chaotically. Kathmandu is now polluted, congested, and the Everest base camp has a trash problem.

Bhutan knows this because it’s seen the bumpy paths other developing economies have gone through. Being the last one has its benefits.

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The common challenges of development

Bhutan is different because there’s a clear intention. It has capital (Bitcoin mining, hydropower exports to India), and good governance with a benevolent ruler who thinks in decades, not election cycles.

Bhutan mirrors Singapore. Its King—like Lee Kuan Yew—operates with an extremely long-term vision and plans to enact change over 40 years.

This brings up hard questions about our Western democratic ideals.

The GMC’s 40-year Diamond Strategy requires consistency across multiple administrations. In a democracy, this is nearly impossible. The US can’t maintain a coherent energy policy across two consecutive presidents. Infrastructure projects get canceled when the other party wins.

The uncomfortable truth is that certain kinds of goods like cultural preservation, environmental protection, long-term infrastructure, generational planning, seem completely at odds with electoral cycles. A leader who needs to win an election in four years has every incentive to prioritize short-term visible wins over long-term, less popular foundations.

Singapore understood this. Lee Kuan Yew built a city-state that achieved massive prosperity in one generation, but he did it by maintaining single-party rule for decades, restricting press freedom, and occasionally jailing political opponents. Most Western observers would call Singapore’s system authoritarian. But walk around Singapore today and compare it to cities that developed under messier, slower democratic transitions.

I’m not arguing for autocracy. Autocracies fail catastrophically when you get a bad ruler, and there’s no mechanism to remove them. The 20th century is full of examples. But the democratic assumption that regular elections and peaceful transfers of power automatically produce good long-term outcomes deserves more scrutiny than it gets.

What happens when you have a benevolent King who cares deeply about improving his country and has a 40-year timeline to achieve it? How does a democracy whose president has a four-year term even compete on problems that require generational thinking?

Bhutan’s bet is that you can have both: a monarchy that sets the long-term vision while gradually building democratic institutions that will eventually take over. The King is actively trying to make himself less necessary.

Whether it works is an open question, but at least they’re ambitious enough to ask it.

Experimenting with development

My trip to Bhutan was interesting because of the beautiful natural setting, the deep spiritual culture, the wonderful group, and especially because it’s fascinating to see a country on the verge of development choosing the path it wants to go down. Bhutanese are attempting to resolve tensions every society has: how to have economic prosperity without eroding our social values; how to participate in the global economy without being devoured by it.

Bhutan’s experiment poses a fundamental question for the 21st century: Is there an alternative to the binary choice between isolation and assimilation? Can traditional cultures survive contact with modernity and live to tell the tale?

Bhutan’s advantage is having the space to think before acting. Most countries face similar pressures: youth unemployment, capital flight, infrastructure needs. But they don’t have the luxury or foresight to think deliberately about development. They open their economy and hope for the best.

If every country follows the same development pattern, we lose laboratories for different ways of organizing for human flourishing. We lose the possibility that there might be multiple valid answers to how societies should develop, what prosperity means, how to balance individual freedom with collective wellbeing.

Bhutan, and GMC specifically, will test whether there’s still room in our globalized world for alternatives. I genuinely have no idea if they’ll pull it off. But I’m glad someone’s trying.

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Thirty days ago I gave myself a wild test: publish one essay every day.

I use the word essay intentionally: it comes from the French essai—a trial, an attempt. That feels right. After all, my writing is an attempt to grasp the world we live in. Not a final assessment. I write to make sense, to answer questions I have, to offer explanations. It’s never finished because I’m always learning about the world— traveling, reading, talking to people, living. The value is in the act, in showing up, in shaping a thought that did not exist an hour before. (And yes, I like the nod to the father of the essay: Montaigne)

Over these thirty days I wrote about gardens and China, vernacular architecture and my Mexicanness, English as the language of the internet, Bertrand Russell and Peter Thiel, the coming multipolar world order, and growing older.

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Some of my favorites:

Now on to the learnings:

Deadlines remove friction.

It didn’t matter that I didn’t feel well, that I was traveling, or that I didn’t know what to say. I wrote. Ideas came. And action begets more action.

It’s paradoxical but the constraints of publishing daily created the focus I thought I lacked. I could go on for 3 or 4 hours of flow without stopping. For a week during my trip to China I woke up early, wrote a rough draft, then went exploring, came back, edited it and shipped. The deadline didn't care about my excuses, and eventually neither did I.

Procrastination really is my biggest enemy. If you wait for perfect conditions, you’ll move at snail pace (or worse, not at all).

Try to avoid the blank page.

I keep a (very) long inbox of notes: observations, questions I can’t shake, bits from books, things friends say. Fleeting thoughts do not wait. When I catch them, they become raw material I return to when deciding what to write.

My essay on English as the language of the internet came from a conversation with my friend Hugo about a year ago. The one about getting older started with an observation of a Gen Z outfit in a café in Mexico City.

Hemingway had this thing of stopping when he was “going good” and knew what would happen next”. That way, the next day he could just get on with it. Same principle: leave yourself breadcrumbs.

When you have no ideas, start writing.

Some days the notes weren’t helpful, so I began with morning pages. I’ve kept this practice—originally prescribed by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way—for five years, and it’s a game changer. The idea is to write three pages fast, longhand, in a stream of consciousness. After one page of mumbling, whatever is in your head comes out. At first it’s usually bottled-up feelings. Keep going and it’s kind of crazy but fully fledged ideas appear, things you didn’t even know were there.

This is by far the best activity if you’re feeling blocked. The unconscious has things to say but it needs the conscious mind to get out of the way first.

Evidence builds agency.

After this month, I feel so confident and I’m thinking about other commitment challenges. I’ve been on and off with a sci-fi novel for years; this might be the time to tackle it.

But it's deeper than just confidence. Each published essay becomes evidence—physical proof that I can create something from nothing, day after day. We tell ourselves stories about what we can and cannot do, but those stories are mostly fiction. The real story is written through action.

Accomplishing difficult things gives you evidence, and evidence kills the myths we tell about our limitations. It becomes a reinforcing cycle in favor of your agency.

Writing every day makes you more present.

Every day I was more attuned to my surroundings, more conscious of my experiences and my thoughts. I paid closer attention.

When I wrote about the vernacular architecture of Yunnan, it was because I couldn’t stop looking at the buildings, noticing the brickwork, how wood darkens where hands touch it, how a town’s building method shifts depending on the geography.

Life becomes research, it’s great.

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The bolder the commitment, the likelier you’ll keep it.

I already had a somewhat stable writing process. I’d published around forty essays pieces before committing to one a day. For months I considered once a week but it felt like too much pressure.

Well, after doing this every day, once a week sounds like an easy goal. Imagine having extra days to polish the piece more, to deepen on the ideas, to just take a break? Sounds like a dream!

The lesson is that we underestimate ourselves systematically. There will never be a perfect time to start, so just start. Sometimes the more audacious goal is easier because it leaves no room for negotiation with yourself.

My writing is all over the place, but there are big themes.

Like I wrote in my favorite problems piece, there’s some method to the madness.

Looking back at the thirty pieces, they seem scattered—vernacular architecture one day, Peter Thiel the next. But you can see the patterns; I keep returning to the same questions: How do we build a prosperous society? Where do people find meaning? How do civilizations rise and evolve?

I feel another thread in my writing is mixing my experience with larger trends, the small and the big. The piece that resonated with most people mixed the two—my notes from China. It blew up and ended up with 15,000 views.

What does the future hold?

More ambition, but the right kind. I want to take on larger questions, read the books that shaped civilizations, engage the thinkers who built them, and go deep into the rabbit holes that matter.

Writing is how I wrestle with the questions that leap at me in this beautiful, chaotic world: How do we build good lives? How do we create meaning instead of waiting for it? How do we make our families stronger, our neighborhoods kinder, our cities more livable?

I have no credentials, no platform, no special authority—just my particular way of seeing. What I can offer is sincerity over cynicism, substance over spectacle, depth over noise.

So I'll keep going, sharing what I find with anyone who wants to think alongside me. If a community forms here, let it grow because we're trying to see more clearly together. Not for clout or metrics but for the quiet joy of making sense in public.

Montaigne said: “When I express my opinions it is so as to reveal the measure of my sight not the measure of things.”

After 30 days of daily essays, my sight hasn't necessarily improved, but I've learned to trust it more. Each essay was a small trial, a test of attention and courage. And man does it take courage to say something out loud to the world.

The attempt is the thing. Everything else is bonus.

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postscript 📮

I can’t believe I’m typing this: essay 30/30. I did it, the publishing blitzkrieg is over!

Honestly, I don’t even know what to ask you guys, just know that I’m going to watch a good movie, get a cup of tea, and sleep at 11 pm on a Friday like a respectable thirty-five-year-old.

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In 1993, Samuel Huntington published "The Clash of Civilizations", where he offered a provocative thesis: the next great conflicts wouldn't be about ideology or economics, but culture. Up until the Cold War ended, he argued, most major conflicts were essentially "civil wars of the West"—European powers or their proxies battling it out. But in contemporary times, Western and non-Western civilizations were all interacting as shapers and movers of history.

Huntington mapped the world into distinct civilizations1, each with its own deep cultural DNA:

• Western

• Orthodox

• Islamic

• Sinic

• Latin America

• Sub-Saharan Africa

• Hindu

• Buddhist

• Japan

For Huntington, civilization represented "the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of what distinguishes humans from other species." These are differentiated by history, language, traditions, and religion. They embody fundamentally different views about the nature of God, the relationship between individual and group, the role of the state, family structures, gender relations, even concepts of liberty and authority.

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Why a Clash?

Huntington identified several forces driving these civilizations toward conflict.

Globalization, paradoxically, was making the world smaller while making differences more visible. He quotes Donald Horowitz: "An Ibo may be… an Owerri Ibo or an Onitsha Ibo in what was the Eastern region of Nigeria. In Lagos, he is simply an Ibo. In London, he is a Nigerian. In New York, he is an African." These expanding circles of identity were creating new tensions. The interactions between peoples of different civilizations were intensifying, and with them, civilization consciousness.

Immigration was accelerating these encounters. But more fundamentally, Huntington argued that as liberal systems hollowed out traditional identities, people were responding by turning back to religion and traditions for meaning. The rise of fundamentalist movements wasn't driven by the poor and ignorant, but by the young, educated middle classes seeking something the secular state couldn't provide (similar to Thiel’s take I wrote about).

Cultural differences, he insisted, are less mutable than political or economic ones. A socialist can become a capitalist, the poor can become rich, but an Armenian cannot become Russian. There are differences between civilizations that may not be reconcilable because they offer different beliefs about human nature, gender, transcendence, and the very purpose of life.

My Reading: The Multipolar Scramble

I feel Huntington's framework is simplistic because it ignores how ideology, class, and technology fragment civilizations from within (more on that later). A civilization is never static.

Yet, it illuminates something essential about our emerging world order. It reveals the fault lines that will matter as regional powers assert themselves in an increasingly multipolar world—one where the West's unifying power is waning. Islam, China, India, Southeast Asia, Latin America—all will participate in a new scrambling for position in the vacuum that the United States and Europe are gradually leaving behind.

Huntington concluded his essay claiming it would be "the West versus the rest" because the West held absolute military, political, and economic power in 1993 when he published it. Oh, how things have changed in thirty years.

The Ideology Factor

Where I diverge from Huntington is in recognizing how ideology fractures civilizations from within. The West isn't a monolith—it's splintering between progressive movements pushing DEI and gender ideology, populist nationalism exemplified by Trump and European right-wing parties, techno-libertarianism from Silicon Valley, climate activism demanding systemic change, and a resurgent socialism among younger generations. In America, the culture wars have become so intense that Democrats and Republicans increasingly live in separate realities (at least in separate states), with only around 4% marrying across party lines. This polarization is a kind of canary in the coal mine, suggesting that ideology will become a growing force to reckon with as it moves out of the West across borders.

China already has economic might, and will achieve global military dominance. Its sphere of influence will grow larger, with influence spreading globally through economics rather than culture. The Chinese have historically been an inward-looking empire—they don't seek to export their culture the way the West exported liberalism or Islam spreads faith. They want respect and resources, not converts.

Meanwhile, India—now the world's fourth-largest economy and a population of 1.4 billion—emerges as a crucial counterbalance to China in Asia while managing its own tensions with Pakistan and internal religious dynamics.

But the real civilizational drama may unfold elsewhere.

Islam Versus the Rest

If any thesis emerges from recent history, it's not "the West versus the rest" but potentially "Islam versus the rest." As Huntington noted, conflict along the fault line between Western and Islamic civilizations has persisted for 1,300 years—from the conquest of Spain to the siege of Vienna, from the Crusades to the fall of Constantinople.

"The West's next confrontation," observed M.J. Akbar, an Indian Muslim author Huntington quoted, "is definitely going to come from the Muslim world. It is in the sweep of the Islamic nations from the Maghreb to Pakistan that the struggle for a new world order will begin."

This has already manifested in the Balkans in the 1990s, in the Middle East's perpetual conflicts, in Africa where Islam meets both Christian and traditional African religions, and in South Asia through Pakistan's tensions with India. Today, there are about 53 Muslim-majority countries. As Huntington observed with remarkable prescience (and controversy): "Violence occurs between Muslims, on the one hand, and Orthodox Serbs in the Balkans, Jews in Israel, Hindus in India, Buddhists in Burma and Catholics in the Philippines. Islam has bloody borders."

The question that interests me is whether some cultures are more prone to expansionism than others. China may be economically aggressive but culturally insular. They've forced homogenization in Tibet and Xinjiang, but these are considered internal frontiers, not evangelical projects. Islam, by contrast, has expansion built into its theology. The faith spreads not just through conversion but through demographic momentum. Which leads me to Europe.

Europe's Demographic Revolution

Nowhere is this transformation more visible than in Europe's kindergartens. According to the latest statistics reported by the Austrian outlet Der Standard, 41.2% of students in Vienna's primary and secondary schools identify as Muslim. In Amsterdam it’s 43%, while Muslims form around 17% of the capital’s total population. These aren't projections—this is now.

The median age of Muslims throughout Europe was 30.4, 13 years younger than the median for other Europeans (43.8). Muslim women in Europe average 2.6 children, compared to 1.6 for non-Muslims. Europe's Muslim population is projected to increase by about 10 million people, from an estimated 25.8 million Muslims in 2016 to 35.8 million in 2050 even in conservative scenarios. In high-migration scenarios, Muslims could constitute 14% of Europe's population by mid-century.

The transformation is particularly striking in Western Europe's major nations. France currently has 5.7 million Muslims (8.8% of the population), with projections suggesting this could reach 17% by 2050. Germany has 5 million Muslims (6.1%), potentially rising to 20% by mid-century under high-migration scenarios. The Netherlands, where Muslims comprise about 6% of the population, has seen Islam become the fastest-growing religion among youth. Sweden, despite its smaller population, has experienced dramatic demographic shifts—Muslims could constitute 20.5% of the population by 2050 even in medium migration scenarios, and up to 30% in high-migration scenarios.

This isn't just about numbers—it's about values, traditions, and the very nature of European identity.

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The Internet as the West's Last Project

One ray of hope in a not-very-bright future for the West is with the internet. I agree with Balaji Srinivasan's thesis that the internet may become (or has become already) the West's greatest decentralized project. Even as Western nation-states stagnate and fragment, the values of open inquiry, individual expression, and liberal discourse live on in digital spaces. The internet speaks English, runs on protocols developed in the West, and embodies values of openness and innovation that are fundamentally Western.

"Western ideas of individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state," Huntington wrote, "often have little resonance in Islamic, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Buddhist or Orthodox cultures." Yet these ideas proliferate online, creating a parallel civilizational space that transcends geography.

Granted, this digital civilization faces its own challenges. Can it maintain coherence as non-Western powers build their own internets? Can it preserve liberal values while accommodating billions of users who might not share them? Will it establish real-life territories? (See Balaji's book: The Network State).

The Question of Modernity Without Westernization

As I explained in my last piece about China, countries are modernizing without Westernizing. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan suggest one path—economic development with cultural preservation, and a selective adoption of democratic norms. China and the Gulf states offer another—material prosperity without political freedom.

I feel the coming world order's real clash will be between different visions of modernity itself. The West's version, premised on individual rights and secular rationalism, competes with China's techno-authoritarian efficiency, Islam's attempt to reconcile faith with development, and other emerging models we haven't yet imagined.

What seems certain is that we're moving toward a genuinely multipolar world—not the unipolar moment America enjoyed after the Cold War—the Pax Americana, but something more complex and unstable. Regional civilizations are asserting themselves, each with its own logic and legitimacy.

The West might lose its dominance, but its ideas—transmitted through technology, encoded in international institutions, embedded in global systems—will persist and evolve. Whether that's enough to prevent Huntington's darkest predictions from coming true remains to be seen. Civilizations clash, but they also merge, evolve, and surprise us.

Maybe we'll find new forms of coexistence in a world where the West no longer writes all the rules, where multiple modernities compete for allegiance, and where the internet remains the arena in which liberal values are debated, forked, and refined beyond their original context. As Balaji puts it, the internet is to the West what America was to Britain—the successor that carries forward its predecessor's best ideas while transcending its limits.

That's the world we're entering, ready or not.

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postscript 📮

29 essays published in 29 days! Tomorrow is my last day!

• If you had to choose, which splits the West more—class, ideology, religion?

• Have you read Balaji’s book on Network States?

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I underestimated how polarizing Peter Thiel is until I posted a meetup to discuss his essay, “The Straussian Moment”. Reddit was not happy. Dozens of replies explained why I shouldn't engage with the ideas of a “techno-fascist.” One person told me: “I’d rather go to Lumphini Park and let a monitor lizard chew on my face.”

No quorum, alas. But here are my takeaways from the essay.

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The Diagnosis

Thiel opens with a bold claim: the terrorist attacks of 9/11 shattered the modern political framework of rational nation-states, international diplomacy, and deterrent armies. Western elites had long believed that material development would pacify the world. That’s why the World Bank and IMF were created, to integrate countries into the global economic order.

Yet 9/11 was not carried out by poor Indians or starving Congolese. It was perpetrated by educated, upper-middle-class Saudis and financed by Osama bin Laden, heir to a $250 million fortune. They had achieved material prosperity, yet they openly and vehemently hated the West.

The modern liberal order assumed that human nature is always rational, self-interested and ultimately collaborative. But Thiel argues that modernity never addressed the big questions about values and virtue, about religion and what it means to lead a good life. Since the Peace of Westphalia, these questions were deemed private matters at best, taboos at worst.

9/11 reminded us that billions of people either haven't gone through the Enlightenment or actively reject its conclusions. Again, these are taboo to consider, but we see it with the rise of Islam and its transparent hostility to the West. We see it with academic currents—gender and postcolonial theory, Marxist analyses—equally open about their disdain for Western civilization. Why is criticizing Christianity culturally accepted—even expected, while criticism of Islam often feels off-limits? Why do critiques of Western ideas flow freely while critiques of other civilizations can feel taboo?

Three Lenses

To probe liberalism’s blind spots, Thiel turns to three thinkers who each illuminate different aspects of the crisis.

The first is Carl Schmitt, the German jurist, warns that the West can’t afford naïveté in this cultural war. He insists that the friend/enemy distinction is the essence of the political. Wishing it away is fatal. If one side denies conflict while the other keeps on fighting, the latter wins.

Schmitt’s warning to naïve elites is chilling:

“In Russia, before the Revolution, the doomed classes romanticized the Russian peasant as a good, brave, and Christian muzhik…. The aristocratic society of France before the Revolution of 1789 sentimentalized “man who is by nature good” and the virtue of the masses…. Nobody scented the revolution; it is incredible to see the security and unsuspiciousness with which these privileged spoke of the goodness, mildness, and innocence of the people when 1793 was already upon them.”

The second thinker is Leo Strauss, the political philosopher, offers a method for reopening taboo questions. He argues many great writers wrote esoterically—hiding hard truths behind irony, odd digressions, or marginal characters (the drunkard, the epicure, the madman). Even in liberal societies, it can be risky to ask fundamental questions about violence, culture, and human nature. Some truths may be knowable, Strauss suggests, but stating them plainly invites persecution. We must read carefully to glimpse the uncomfortable truths that thinkers embedded in the Great Books. As Strauss reminds us through Goethe's Faust:

"The few who understood something of men's heart and mind, who were foolish enough not to restrain their full heart but to reveal their feeling and their vision to the vulgar, have ever been crucified and burned."

Then we come to René Girard, author of the mimetic theory, who provides the psychological mechanism behind social breakdown. Humans imitate, imitation breeds rivalry, rivalry turns to envy and it escalates into a war of all against all. But this transforms into war against one person as "the same mimetic forces gradually drive the combatants to gang up on one particular person" or group. This scapegoat's death unites the community again. The victim gets mythologized, inscribed into sacrificial rites that control future rivalries. When these sacrificial mechanisms weaken, rivalry intensifies.

For Thiel, this explains why modern societies, having abandoned these traditional outlets for managing rivalry, may be particularly vulnerable to runaway escalation.

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The Impasse

Thiel focuses on diagnosis rather than solution. He closes with a tepid call to Christian statesmen to choose peace, remembering that "one day all will be revealed, that all injustices will be exposed, and that those who perpetrated them will be held to account." The destiny of our postmodern world "could differ from the modern world in a way that is much worse or much better.”

The essay's most insightful element is its relentless focus on our current impasse. Enlightenment liberalism risks stagnation—processes crowd out decision and direction, meaning is lost. The pre-modern inheritance risks dogma—one sacred truth pressed on everyone, often by force.

What Now

Thiel offers no prescription. So where does that leave us?

Is there a way to strengthen the modern West without destroying it altogether, a way of not throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

We know by now that abundance won’t solve all issues, especially those of meaning, purpose, and transcendence. Our mistake wasn’t having these questions, it was pretending they belong only in private spaces, then letting the loudest closed-door factions provide radical answers.

Maybe the West's renewal begins when we address the big questions openly and argue toward constructive answers. I remain cautiously optimistic—I think people can be good when given better options. That doesn't deny that many in power want conflict, or that they can mobilize those hungry for order.

Yes, we should confront hard truths about human nature—but without swinging to extremes. If the West's core problem is self-stifling comfort, I'd rather wrestle with decadence than crusade. Better boredom than blood—so long as boredom isn't the last word.

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postscript 📮

Essay 28/30. Let’s go!!

• Do you like Peter Thiel? Do you hate him?

• How do we discuss civilization's deepest questions without that discussion becoming violent?

• Which uncomfortable truth about human nature do you think the West most needs to confront?

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It’s really obvious but it needs repeating: there is no best city in the world, no best neighborhood, no best street or bar or restaurant. It’s all subjective.

The magazines and organizations who publish these ranking annoyingly pretend it isn’t. The 50 Best, Time Out, The Economist, Michelin, Gallup, Mercer— they look professional because they mention “criteria” and “data”.

But the data and criteria are choices in disguise. Every “best city” list hides a point of view, a set of values. Most times for the time that means safety over spontaneity, cleanliness over chaos, 7am productivity over 1am joy. That’s why we always see the same cities: Zurich, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Vienna.

I have no beef with rankings per se, or the fact they try to use spreadsheets. My beef is with their pretense of neutrality.

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The map is not the territory

All these lists use proxies to interpret reality. A “safety index” is not the same as how you feel walking home at midnight. “Culture and environment” as a category does not tell you whether a jazz bar is open at 2 am. Nordic countries often top the UN’s World Happiness Report and people who’ve never visited assume folks there are beaming with joy. Well, the study rests on a single question: it asks people to rate their lives on a 0–10 ladder (“life evaluation”), averaged across three years. That number often correlates with safety, trust for their government and material security—but it doesn’t directly measure happiness (or depression, for that matter).

Which brings me to my second point: vibe is important data—just not spreadsheet data. Go to a city and experience street density, local warmth, late-night transit, these are observable signals that shape your everyday experience, but they rarely show up in rankings because they’re harder to measure.

Try these quick tests in your city and they’ll tell you a ton about where you live:

• Bench test: free, shaded seat in sidewalk, plaza or park in less than a 10-min walk?

• Midnight snack test: tasty, non-chain food less than 10 minutes on foot at 1 am?

• Kid-alone-on-public-transport test: do you see one going to school on their own?

• Street-tree test: are there a lot of trees, preferably different species, and do the canopies meet?

Embrace subjectivity

So let me practice what I preach. I'm a sucker for cute bookstores, and value spontaneous encounters, love street food, and cities that feel alive at 1 pm and 1 am. I want tree-lined streets where old men play backgammon, neighborhoods where the barista knows your name, and plazas where teenagers practice skateboard tricks while grandmothers gossip on benches. These are some of my biases, and they absolutely shape how I experience a city.

Here's my shamelessly subjective 100-point index—the Santi Index, if you will:

• Culinary Ecosystem (20): chef-owned spots, local markets, street food, culinary depth, late-night joints

• Street-Level Joy (15): people out and about, plazas/benches/parks density; “lingerability”, vibrant sidewalks

• Third-Place Density (15): cafés with obsessive baristas, neighborhood wine bars, bookstores, maker spaces, social clubs, community events per km².

• Walkability & Transit (15): interesting streets, sidewalks, safe pedestrian crossings, reliable public transit, non-insane traffic

• Weather (15): warm but not scorching, lots of sunlight, no blizzards

• Interesting Shops (10): local crafts, map stores, antique dealers, flower shops

• Everyday Nature (10): trees, water access, local fauna, parks within 20-minute walks

I’m not trying to win an argument or convince you about my criteria, just being honest about why certain places attract me so much.

The lists I can get behind

• Best Cities for Gaining 5 Kg in 5 Days:

  • CDMX (street food galore)

  • San Sebastián (pintxos, txakoli, repeat)

  • Bangkok (sweet-sour-spicy deliciousness)

  • Naples (pizza and more pizza)

• Best Cities for Getting Lost :

  • Tokyo (it’s all about the small alleyways behind the big avenues)

  • Venice (you might as well escape the crowds)

  • Fez (a maze that calls itself a city)

  • Barcelona (the tiny medieval streets of El Born)

• Cities That Feel Like Living in a Movie:

  • San Francisco (fog included)

  • Paris (with or without the Eiffel Tower)

  • Istanbul (if you need a bazaar chase scene)

  • Prague (every corner a thriller set)

• Favorite Cities for Architecture Nerds:

  • Chicago (skyscraper history + Frank Lloyd Wright)

  • Paris (Hausmannian grandeur)

  • Berlin (contemporary adaptive reuse)

  • Rome (my literal Roman Empire)

• Cities Where You Can Wear the Same Outfit Year-Round:

  • San Diego (eternal spring uniform)

  • CDMX (jeans, a t-shirt and an overshirt)

  • Bogotá (constant rain, but at least you know)

  • Singapore (it’s hot or unbearably hot)

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Why we seek rankings in the first place

Yes I’m being facetious, but these lists matter. They influence tourism, expat flows and whether your restaurant is booked out months in advance (see: Michelin).

We seek rankings because having infinite options is exhausting. In a world where you could theoretically live, travel or eat anywhere, we need someone to narrow it down—preferably if they pretend it’s a rigorous process.

But there’s no single best city, restaurant, or neighborhood—and it’s silly to pretend otherwise. The best city in the world is the one that matches your particular brand of weird. Maybe you need to see the sea while sipping your morning coffee. Maybe you need a 24-hour ramen spot within walking distance. Maybe you need to hear five languages on your commute. These aren't universal necessities—they're yours.

So use the rankings as a starting point, a rough sketch of the territory. And remember: Zurich's perfectly clean sidewalks won't help if what you really need is Bangkok's beautiful chaos. The best city in the world is deeply, unapologetically personal.

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postscript 📮

Essay 27/30. Almoooost there!

• Most overrated city that rankings love?

• Guilty-pleasure city you’d never defend in public?

• First-date city vs. long-term city? (i.e. where would you love to live for a few months vs. a decade?)

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Vernacular fashion

I spent three weeks in India last December. One early morning, while exploring Kerala’s backwaters, the boat captain took me for a walk through his island village near Alleppey. Elderly neighbors sat on their porches with the paper. A girl on her way to school waved. Two men brushed their teeth on stone steps that led into the water; people there wash their clothes and themselves in the canal. A few waited for the water taxi. An old woman tended her garden. Just the ebbs and flows of daily life.

What caught my eye were the men’s outfits. They wore lungis—often called mundus in Kerala—rectangular cloths wrapped at the waist, similar to sarongs.

That lungi isn’t just fabric. It adapts as the day unfolds: full-length in the cool of morning, folded to the knee for heat and work, adjusted constantly without thought. It’s simple, dynamic, and tuned to Kerala’s humid climate and rhythms. To me, this is vernacular fashion: garments shaped by place.

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I saw the same intelligence elsewhere. In Abu Dhabi, local men in white kanduras and red-checked ghutras strolled through a luxury mall past Gucci and Balenciaga. The kandura is perfectly engineered for the desert: white to reflect heat, loose to invite airflow, long to guard against sun and sand. In an air-conditioned mall it drapes elegantly; outside, in 45°C heat, it’s essential technology.

In Yunnan, Bai women at the market wore traditional dress. Headdresses with white tassels unwrap into face coverings when dust kicks up. Aprons worn front and back come off for sitting, reposition for carrying, and layer for warmth. Every element has a purpose.

The globalized wardrobe

In most of the world, fashion has done something remarkable: you can buy the same t-shirt in Bangkok or Boston, find your size in Stockholm or São Paulo. A $1.7 trillion industry has democratized access. A student in Manila can dress like a student in Milan. There’s real comfort, and power, in that.

But this global wardrobe comes with trade-offs. Designing for everywhere often means being perfect for nowhere. Pricier natural fibers have been replaced by polyester that doesn’t breathe in summer or keep you warm in winter. Cuts that assume all bodies move the same way through all environments.

When we try to make clothing "dynamic" in the industrial world, we get zip-off hiking pants that become shorts—gear most people find deeply uncool, worn only by serious hikers (and my über-efficient German friends). Meanwhile, a simple lungi achieves more flexibility with no fasteners at all.

Even our technical fabrics can't match what nature provides. Cashmere warms without overheating. Linen cools while protecting you from the sun. Naxi felted wool capes in Yunnan naturally shed water and trap warmth.

Walking through Bangkok, Mexico City, New York, or Paris, I’m struck by the visual convergence. The same stores anchor the same malls; the same silhouettes and styles across the seasons. It’s not just about aesthetics. As countries develop, clothing traditions are often the first to be shed in favor of jeans and t-shirts. In many offices across the Global South, the business suit has become a universal uniform—even when it demands aggressive air-conditioning to be bearable.

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Toward a neo-vernacular

In Yunnan, I kept noticing young people—mostly women—renting traditional Naxi and Bai outfits for elaborate photoshoots. It's tourism, of course, but it might also signal something else: a desire for clothing that tells a story about a place, about local culture.

What if we blended the convenience of global fashion with the intelligence of vernacular dress? Not a step backward, but forward: garments that again respond to climate and culture, using new technology without discarding local knowledge. Traditional fibers woven on high-tech looms. Cuts that respect traditional draping but work for modern movement.

We’ve chosen global fashion for its convenience and its promise of belonging to a more modern world. In the trade, we’ve lost clothing that responds to where we actually are and how we actually live. Perhaps a neo-vernacular movement in fashion can mean rediscovering that a simple piece of cloth, wrapped right, can do more than any zipper ever could.

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postscript 📮

Essay 26/30. Only 4 to go—thank you, muses!

• What’s the lungi/kandura of your hometown—is there one?

• What’s one global look you see everywhere? (For me it’s the Uniqlo oversized t-shirt for men.)

• If AC disappeared for a week, how would your outfits change? (I’d melt in Bangkok.)

Since hunter-gatherers banded together, one of the most pressing concerns in human history has been how to live with each other peacefully. Who holds power and authority? Under which values should we organize? How do we divide our bounty?

This negotiation is a constant of civilization. Sometimes we live in more warring times, sometimes in more peaceful ones (like the past fifty years).

The thing is, there is no universal value system. There is no one way to live, no one way to behave, no one way to organize society. We are in a constant battle to make sense.

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Now, in the 21st century, we live in a more integrated world, with rapid technological development and a better quality of life for most people. Are we still talking about morality today?

Absolutely. Scratch the surface of today’s socioeconomic context and you’ll find moral values there, lurking, directing what type of society we create, the type of institutions we develop, which ideals we extol. They shape the projects we undertake: capitalism, socialism, and everything between

Remember how Charlemagne played a pivotal role in the establishment of Christianity as he expanded his power? Every political movement develops a moral system to back it up.

The right thinks the past was better. When men could be men and women women. When traditional values instilled a sense of duty and honor. The left thinks that the future will bring true equality. Once all capital is redistributed the world will be perfect. Once all injustices are paid off, everything will be OK.

But it isn’t only “woke vs. anti-woke”. The culture wars are the loudest fight in the West, not the only one.

With the internet, we have a fragmentation of movements: we have trads (a return to traditional gender and family roles), accelerationists (different flavors of speeding up progress and change), postrationalists (rational + intuition/spirituality), metamodernists (post-irony, renewed sincerity), neo-Luddites, doomer optimists, and a long etc.

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Alongside this fragmentation, the older moral architectures remain powerful.
Christianity and Islam still organize meaning, identity, and law for billions. Christianity continues to evolve—declining in some Western settings while expanding and intensifying across the Global South. Islam’s public presence has grown enormously in Europe and North America through migration, and in many parts of the Middle East and Africa more radical interpretations still shape family policy, education, and public life. Both traditions are growing, and their debates over authority, virtue, and community continue to set the terms for politics far beyond their congregations.

The point still stands: there is no universal morality, no universal values, no universal truth about how to live our lives. We are always negotiating.

And that’s where technology—and now AI—raises the stakes. Technology amplifies whatever vision its builders believe. We can design privacy-respecting, pro-social AI, or an authoritarian panopticon. That’s why the question of values needs to take center stage: what are we optimizing for? Safety, comfort, equality, power, belonging, transcendence, stewardship? These shouldn’t be engineering questions.

As more of life is mediated by code, the questions about beliefs return with force: Can plural societies sustain cohesion without a single moral or religious foundation? Who gets to define progress—citizens, markets, governments, algorithms? What is a good life? How will people find purpose and meaning the coming decades?

The answers won’t be universal—or permanent—but the act of questioning is what keeps us from from slipping into either chaos or control.

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postscript 📮

Essay 24 of my 30 essays in 30 days. Still typing, still alive. Only 6 more to go before a much-needed rest and then I’m off to Bhutan!

• Would you rather live in a world that’s 10% smarter or 10% more sincere?

• What’s one thing everyone takes seriously that you secretly find a little absurd?

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About a week ago, I went back to visit Yunnan. Walking through the ancient towns another reality hit me: China doesn't need us anymore. These towns were packed with only Chinese tourists, I counted maybe ten Westerners the whole week. No Starbucks, no McDonald's, no Western chains at all. Just tea shops selling pu'er, silver ornaments, wooden objects, ceramics, dried mushrooms, and flower cakes. China has built its own enormous internal market—its own tourism, its own brands, its own everything. They've turned inward not from isolation but from self-sufficiency.

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Ask a foreigner about China

It's wild how many people still think of China as the place that makes cheap crap. This perception is frozen somewhere in the 2000s. Japan went through the same arc. "Made in Japan" meant low quality in the 50s, then it meant the best electronics in the world by the 70s. But China's transformation happened even faster. In roughly a decade, they went from knockoff smartphones to homegrown EVs that compete head-to-head with Tesla.

The numbers are insane. By purchasing-power parity (PPP), China has been the world’s largest economy since the mid-2010s, responsible for roughly a fifth of global output. Chinese labs and firms now lead in the majority of frontier technologies. And in manufacturing, China’s output is larger than the US and EU combined. Yet somehow we still talk about China like it’s “emerging.” Crazy.

The great leapfrog

In rural Yunnan, I saw this ancient tractor with no hood—engine completely exposed—passing by a swarm of electric motorcycles. That image captures the development curve here: steep and fast.

Take banking. The US went from cash to checks to credit cards to using Venmo a lot. China went straight from cash to mobile payments. They had limited credit card infrastructure, so when Alipay and WeChat showed up, boom—an instant cashless society. Now about a billion Chinese pay with a scan.

Or look at energy. The West spent 150 years building coal plants, then natural gas, then slowly adding renewables. China went from burning coal directly to becoming the world's solar panel factory. They make 80% of all solar panels globally.

Transportation? California approved high-speed rail in 2008 to link LA and San Francisco for $33 billion. Costs ballooned; there’s still no service. The U.K. canceled HS2’s northern leg after years of overruns. Berlin’s new airport opened almost a decade late and billions over budget. Meanwhile, China built 40,000 kilometers of high-speed rail that runs at 350 km/h.

Retail? The US built 23 million square feet of retail space per capita—ten times more than Europe—most of it in strip malls and big boxes surrounded by parking lots. Then Americans slowly moved online, with Amazon taking 20 years to capture 10% of retail. China skipped the strip mall phase entirely. They went straight from street markets to super-apps that livestream shopping, where one influencer can sell $15 million worth of lipstick in five minutes.

Three Chinas, one lifetime

I imagine a Chinese family and there’s three completely different Chinas. One was about survival, the second aspiration, and the final one about prosperity.

The grandmother, 75 years old (born 1950): She represents Mao's China, a world of scarcity and ideology. She was eight during the Great Leap Forward, when famines killed 30 million people. Her village had no electricity until she was twenty. Her entire childhood was about collective farms, struggle sessions, and Red Guards. The state controlled everything—where you lived, what you ate, who you married.

The father, 45 years old (born 1980): He represents Deng's China, when the country opened up and looked outward for models. He was born two years after Deng Xiaoping said "to get rich is glorious" and launched the reform era. His childhood coincided with China becoming the world's factory floor. Germany's exports to China surged from 52 billion euros in 2009 to 123 billion euros in 2021. This guy's first job in 1998 might have been at one of these German factories. His generation witnessed China join the WTO in 2001, Beijing hosting the Olympics in 2008, and becoming the world's second-largest economy in 2010.

The teenager, 15 years old (born 2010): She represents Xi's China, technologically advanced and confident. Born the year China overtook Japan economically. Has never known a China that wasn't a superpower. She boards high-speed trains with facial recognition, uses apps the West doesn’t have, and has never written a check. Her China isn’t catching up to anyone.

That's three completely different universes of experience in one family, sitting around the same dinner table: from famine to facial recognition in 75 years.

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The beginning of China’s dominion

China now leads in renewable without the discourse. Solar panels? 80% Chinese-made. Wind turbines and EV batteries? 60% and 75% Chinese-made. Heat pumps? China is the main manufacturer and exporter. We’re going to solve climate change with a lot of Chinese technology or we’re not going to solve it at all. (Who tells Greta Thunberg?)

The Global South is voting with its money. The Belt and Road now counts roughly 150 partner countries. Developing nations want material infrastructure, and China delivers: ports, railways, power plants.

Tech is splitting. There’s a Chinese internet (WeChat, Alipay, Douyin, Baidu) serving 1.4 billion people—and there’s everyone else. They don’t need Google.

Supply chains can’t function without China. Every single attempt to "decouple" fails. China doesn't just assemble your iPhone. They mine the rare earths, refine the materials, make the components, build the machines that build the machines.

Democracy stopped being inevitable. Singapore, Dubai, Rwanda—they're all copying the Chinese model: authoritarian capitalism with good PR. Deliver growth, maintain order, forget the voting. It's spreading.

The uncomfortable questions

The government we call authoritarian is delivering what Western democracies struggle to: stuff that actually works. Their infrastructure works. Extreme poverty collapsed. Life expectancy increased by 10 years. They can plan 20 years ahead while Western politicians can't plan past the next election.

This breaks our Western discourse. We were told that democracy and development go together. That free markets require free politics. That our system was the "end of history."

But China proved you can pair authoritarian politics with a market economy. It offers a bargain we thought impossible: prosperity without freedom, development without democracy, safety without expansive civil liberties. And for the billions of people who remember being hungry, who want their kids to have better lives, who care more about rising wages than free speech—it's getting harder to argue they're wrong.

This worries me. I greatly value Western ideals—freedom of speech, democracy, individual rights. These things matter.

The tragedy isn’t that China is winning, it’s that the West stopped imagining better futures.

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postscript 📮

22 essays published, 8 to go!

• Have you been to China?

• What country, region or city offers an optimistic vision of the future?

  Leave a comment

Explain your life to people living in the Middle Ages. Not to the serfs bound to serve their lords, and not to the peasants who used animal bladders as windows and often died from smoke inhalation when they lit fires indoors to survive the cold.

Let's talk to the King of France, one of Europe's richest and most powerful. Tell him that you earn money by working with your mind and that you can buy a mango in Paris in mid-January. Explain to that poor soul that you would never use a gilded carriage, but step into into a two-ton metal machine with comfy seats that glides along a paved road, while music plays and warm (or cool) air blows directly on your face.

Tell the merchants that you can choose by peaceful means who rules over your country. That you have religious freedom and can marry anyone you want—and divorce them, too.

Tell your great grandparents that you have a rectangle in your pocket that allows you to connect with anyone in the world and you can see their faces through real-time video. Tell them you just rode a driver-less cab, and how you have access to all of the world’s information by simply typing it.

You and Jeff Bezos use the same phone model, watch the same movies, listen to the same music, and go to the same museums or concerts.

This is not normal.

For most of human history, life meant scarcity and poverty. We romanticize the past because the grass looks greener, but the grass has literally never been this green.

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Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater

There are obvious flaws in our systems and institutions. Democracy can devolve into simple majority rule, capitalism ignores externalities, social media breeds isolation, consumption culture promotes waste, industrial farming often shows little concern for animal welfare. There’s so much to improve. Yet our discourse fixates on victimhood and blame rather than solutions—on envying and controlling wealth rather than creating it.

I want to build on what works while fixing what doesn't. We must resist the narratives of victimization, radicalization, and identitarianism that dominate today's politics.

Ironically, movements seeking to dismantle "the system" often fail to recognize that this same system—and its reforms—most directly benefit the oppressed people they claim to champion.

China adopted market mechanisms and lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. I saw this while living in Shanghai. My realtor grew up near the North Korean border in extreme poverty and hunger; he now owned two apartments in his village and ran a successful business renting to foreigners. Similar stories are playing out in India, Vietnam, Rwanda.

Two things can be true at once: (a) our system is great at lifting people out of poverty and providing material well-being, and (b) it still has many flaws that we need to address

What we’ve lost is a unifying narrative of progress, freedom, and optimism—one that draws together people across nations, cultures, and political sides.

From nihilism to optimism

Material conditions are the bedrock for fulfilling spiritual, social and intellectual ones, i.e. Maslow was right. You need food and shelter before you can worry about purpose and self-actualization.

For most of human history, people were just trying to survive. Today, much of the West lives in material comfort, but we're struggling with the big questions: What's my purpose? Where do I belong? Who am I, really?

Yes, modern life makes it harder to find meaning and connection. But let's be honest, that's on us too. Why do we find it so easy to blame others and grow cynical instead of focusing on ourselves, on our friends and community? Why would we rather tear down centuries of progress than keep building?

What really worries me is how passive, how blasé we've become. We act as if things just happen to us, as if we have no say in how the world turns out.

I believe the future can be better: more freedom, more prosperity, more opportunity. Yet this is obviously up for grabs.

Our future is not ordained. History doesn’t progress automatically. We’re capable of transformation, but only if we decide what kind of world we want to live in, and then set about building it.

Ultimately, we need optimism to build stuff.

If we don’t believe our lives can get better, we won't do anything to improve them and it will all be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

postscript 📮

• If you could live in any other era in history, would you actually choose it over today? Be honest.

• Ok, you need to explain TikTok’s viral dances to Marcus Aurelius, what would you say?

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Last year, we had a cena cultural in Madrid: a regular-ish dinner where one of our friends shares a topic they're particularly interested in. That night we discussed free speech—its definition, boundaries and approaches taken by different countries (looking at you Germany).

After dinner and a few martinis, someone protested that none of this mattered, that our conversation wouldn’t change the course of history. In the end, things would still happen, and we wouldn't have any influence on how the world evolved.

The comment lingered.

Does it matter? I'm not talking about our actual conversation (it obviously did as we had a great time), but conversations in a larger sphere, talking about ideas, reflecting on the world.

Here’s my two cents.

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Consider recency bias

We tend to assume that the world has always been this way.

Sure, life in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance was different, but the life of our grandparents had was probably very similar to ours, except for not having a smartphone and social media.

Technological change is very visible, but institutions and cultural practices fly under our radar.

Cultural values and ideas are latent.

Have you ever thought why schools are the way they are, with standardized subjects, 30 children per classroom, lectures, recess? Education has obviously existed for millennia but the content, the way it’s been taught— the purpose of it—has changed completely.

The same with so many things: the idea of family, work, retirement, even government services.

The very danger of the recency bias is that we project it to the future. We assume that everything will continue as it is. Schools will always be boring and full of fluff. Nation states will always exist. Democracies will continue forever.

It’s hard to see the outsized influence of people in big systems, but all those institutions, those bureaucracies, those innovative companies—even discourse itself—were created by individuals and are run by people every day.

Of course things can change.

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The 10% theory of history

There’s the great man theory of history where history is essentially "the biography of great men”. This theory was popularized by Thomas Carlyle in the 19th century. He analyzed great leaders who shaped history—Muhammad, Martin Luther, Napoleon...

It was criticized for simplifying history, focusing too much on individuals without considering broader economic and cultural forces. There’s some truth to this obviously. But contemporary thought went to the other extreme, considering only socioeconomic processes and systems.

The idea that all individuals are totally shaped by huge impersonal systems like capitalism, bureaucracy, patriarchy, or colonialism is dangerously prevalent today. It implies that history just happens to us—it has trajectory and a wrong one at that. We are just victims to historical processes larger than ourselves.

That’s kind of wrong. There are enormous, complex systems at work. But they were created and are maintained and replicated by people.

So, here’s my addendum to the great man theory of history: I don’t think it’s one person, but I do think it’s a group of people that have enormous influence on the direction we take. Networks with node leaders.

Let’s go back to the question if discussing ideas is a waste of time. It is for 90% of people.

First off, most of the 90% are not even interested in discussing these types of topics. They don’t know what to think of it. Others have already made up their minds. They are set in their ways and don’t need—don’t want— to have their ideas challenged.

So what makes the 10% different? Why do they matter?

The 10% of people who do engage with these ideas will likely influence the other 90%

And these ten percenters are not necessarily who you think.

Ask someone on the street if they've heard of intersectionality and you'll probably get a blank look. Yet this theory is the precursor of most of our discourse today, especially in leftist circles.

Intersectionality was coined by academic Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. It describes how overlapping social identities—like race, gender, and class—create new forms of oppression/privilege. Rings a bell?

How can a random academic have so much reach? She didn’t do it alone. The rest of the cultural elite (the 10 percenters who rarely get mentioned—it’s always the rich, but not the influential) took notice. Other academics at Ivy Leagues started writing about it. Artists and activists started using it as a framework. Then journalists and commentators published op-eds. Then influencers via social media delivered it to anyone with a smartphone.

You see, a relatively small minority possesses the network, education, communication skills, creativity, or charisma needed to impact the masses significantly. They have enormous cultural leverage.

The cultural discourse still works like a funnel. There are no longer traditional gatekeepers like newspapers or news hosts, but there's still enormously influential people. They’re even better at disseminating ideas because now they can memeify them and go viral. Before you had Walter Cronkite, today you have thousands of 25-year-old influencer with 1 million followers and 20 million weekly views.

There are still great individuals changing the world, but it's the 10% who take their ideas seriously, who work at their companies, who who read their books, who buy into their vision of the world, and make it happen.

postscript 📮

This a topic I’ve been thinking a lot about. It’s fascinating how culture becomes “the water we swim in”. There were other types of water before and there will be more in the future. Which visions will win?

• If you met a young, well-off guy in LA, would you guess what his political inclinations are?

• What about a 50-year-old farmer from Kansas?

• Are we as independent thinkers as we think we are? Do we want to be?

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The word "vernacular" comes from the Latin vernaculus, meaning "domestic, native, indigenous." Vernacular architecture refers to buildings made by local people using local materials and traditional techniques, without formal architectural design or professional architects.

Think of adobe houses, yurts, village shrines, igloos, stilt houses, barns—all built by the community in the same climate-specific way for centuries or millennia.

You see, Yunnan is home to many ancient towns, some are even UNESCO World Heritage Sites. And we visited many: Dali, Shaxi, Shuhe, Lijiang, Yuhu. I wrote about how Lijiang’s success at preserving its character became its curse as it became (mostly) a theme park.

This all got me thinking about how a country's approach to traditional architecture reflects its economic development. When countries are poor, vernacular architecture isn't an aesthetic choice, it's the only option. As wealth increases, the relationship changes. Foreign materials become available, governments push modernization agendas, tourism creates new incentives, and eventually, if a country becomes wealthy enough, it can afford to preserve and revive traditional building methods with modern sophistication. Yunnan's architectural evolution over the past decades shows these stages clearly.

The years are very broad approximations on my part, the stages are what’s important.

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Stage 1: The Original Vernacular (Pre-1950s)

For millennia, Yunnan's ethnic minorities built with what they had. This wasn't a design choice—local materials and traditional techniques were the only available options. But necessity bred intelligence, what Christopher Alexander calls the “timeless way of building”: forms that evolve from use, climate, and local resources.

We traveled through the areas of the Bai people (in Dali and Shaxi) and the Naxi (in and around Lijiang).

Bai people’s most iconic building is the "three rooms and one wall" courtyard houses. They were built with rammed earth and stone and then painted white, or white and red. The reflecting white wall facing the main entrance did several jobs—it bounced sunlight into the courtyard and ground floor rooms, blocked direct summer sun, protected from the wind, gave the family privacy from the street, and provided a surface for decoration, usually depicting protective symbols and family honors. Room placement followed social hierarchy too, with elders getting the western rooms (considered most honorable) and younger family members to the east.

We saw a ton of these, especially when we walked through Shilong, a very small village opposite a reservoir, near our hotel in rural Yunnan. It was fascinating to see how architecture plays such an important role. Many of the white walls were painted with messages, and illustrations depicting horses and agriculture.

When we got to Lijiang we saw two different approaches by the Naxi people dependent on the geography. Lijiang is at a higher elevation than Shaxi, it sits in a forested valley on the base of the famous Jade Dragon Snow Mountain.

Timber was readily available, so most of the buildings are built entirely of wood. I was able to take a picture of an entire structure without any floors and walls, where you can see the scale of the timber frame, with enormous single logs acting as columns.

Wooden structures additionally handle earthquakes better than rigid stone—they can flex and resettle without collapsing. They have elaborate brackets and carved beams that aren't just decoration; they distribute the weight of those heavy tile roofs while allowing the whole structure to move slightly during seismic activity.

Then we went towards Yuhu village— at the actual base of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain—the buildings changed slightly. Now the bottom was built from stone, while the second floor had wood. This is pretty clever when you think about it. The stone base lifts the wood above ground moisture and snow, preventing rot and termite damage. Stone also stores heat during the day and releases it at night, helping regulate temperature as this is a colder area. Meanwhile, the lighter wooden upper floor can flex during earthquakes and it’s easier to manage. Families could replace damaged wooden sections while keeping the stone foundations their grandparents built.

Vernacular buildings might look basic when we see them through our modern frame, but they all represent practical adaptations refined through centuries. Each technique solved specific local problems using available materials, and many of these solutions are surprisingly similar to what sustainable architects promote today—they just arrived at them through centuries of experience.

Stage 2: The Concrete Revolution (1950s-1990s)

Then came concrete, and a program. In the 1950s–60s, China’s cities adopted Soviet-style planning and standardized blocks. Enormous apartment buildings were built to house more people.

In the countryside the shift was slower, but once rural incomes rose after 1978, villages across Yunnan began replacing timber and earth with brick-concrete houses and, often, flat concrete roofs.

This was about bringing modernity to rural China. Concrete was cheaper to produce at scale, faster to build with, and didn't require specialized craftsmen who knew traditional techniques. The construction process became standardized.

For a developing country, this made economic sense. Why spend months building a traditional timber frame house when you could pour concrete in weeks? Why maintain complex wooden joinery when reinforced concrete was seen as longer-lasting with less maintenance?

Master craftsmen's knowledge, accumulated over centuries, began disappearing in a single generation. But at the time, this was seen as progress, not loss.

Stage 3: Decorated Boxes (1990s-2010s)

As China opened up and became richer, Yunnan's architecture entered an awkward transitional phase. Citizens had more economic opportunities beyond agriculture. Tourism began arriving. Suddenly, there was economic value in looking traditional.

The government recognized that generic concrete structures weren't attracting tourists. There was money to be made from heritage tourism, but the old buildings were mostly gone or deteriorating, and the ones that were already built looked generic. The solution? Make new buildings look old.

Dali's building codes began mandating "traditional Chinese style"—tiled roofs and white walls—in the Ancient Town and buffer zones. But these were concrete structures with just the facade of tradition (literally and figuratively).

I call this the façadism phase: concrete cores with applied ‘traditional’ wooden facades, swooping eaves as ornament on modern boxes.

This made sense when China was still developing. It cost more than plain concrete but far less than genuine traditional construction. You got the visual effect tourists expected without the expense or expertise of actual vernacular building. It was pragmatic. China had become wealthy enough to care about aesthetics but not wealthy enough to do it properly.

Stage 4: The Sophisticated Return (2010s-Present)

Now China is the world's second-largest economy. It has resources, and more importantly, it has confidence. And Yunnan's contemporary architecture reflects this.

Unlike many developing nations whose architectural traditions were disrupted by globalization, China maintains continuous building traditions stretching back millennia. There's something substantial to revive.

In Yuhu, we saw so many construction sites being built with traditional methods. New shops and small hotels on the main road used timber framing and stone, with larger openings and underfloor heating.

Our rural Shilong hotel was unmistakably contemporary yet built in rammed earth and timber.

A third-wave coffee shop in Shaxi serving very tasty pour-overs used traditional timber framing with an open plan and large panes of glass.

On our way to a lake near Yuhu, we walked a path where an old traditional building stood next to a modern hotel. You could see the inspiration. The hotel used the vernacular language (stone, tiled roof, wooden second floor) but made it modern.

You get the idea. Everywhere in Yunnan we saw a new way of development, a more sophisticated way of building with a sense of place while respecting local traditions but without sacrificing modern conveniences. This is the way forward.

The Bigger Picture

This matters beyond architecture.

As we face increasingly homogenized global landscapes, distinctiveness has value. We all want to feel like we’re in a place connected to its history and its community.

The ultimate goal isn't creating museums and freezing buildings in their "authentic" state, but maintaining what matters while allowing natural evolution.

The four stages of architectural development aren't just about buildings. They're about how cultures can navigate modernity without losing themselves.

Because in our globalized world, maintaining a sense of place requires conscious effort. If we don’t, we will have globalized, generic spaces that (although beautiful and hip) don’t tell us anything about where we are. We could be sipping our overpriced oat milk latte in London, Bangkok or Mexico City and the coffeeshop would look identical. That would be a shame.

The question isn't whether to preserve or develop—again, we don’t want to live in museums, nor in ugly concrete boxes—but how to do both thoughtfully. Yunnan demonstrates it's possible.

postscript 📮

So many rabbit hole to explore but not enough time... Btw, this is the 18th essay on my 30 essays, 30 days challenge!

• What does “traditional” look like in your hometown?

• Does your favorite local coffee shop look like it could be anywhere in the world? (I’m guessing, yes?)

• Have you read The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander? If not, you need to!

  Leave a comment

If you’re reading this on email, click the title to see the photos in full resolution on Substack.

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Lijiang: From Trading Post to Tourist Theater

We went to Lijiang, the most famous of all the ancient towns, and boy oh boy was it full. Shoulder-to-shoulder crowds shuffling through narrow streets, light shows, shops selling flower cakes, Pu’er tea and silverware, over and over again (this was a constant throughout Yunnan). It got so bad that we left after only a couple of hours. This wasn’t an ancient town; it was the performance of one.

Lijiang's transformation started with good intentions though. When UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site in 1997, the town was still an important goods distribution center for trade between Sichuan, Yunnan and Tibet, where the Silk Road joins the Ancient Tea Horse Road. The designation was meant to preserve this heritage.

Instead, it triggered an avalanche of development. Visitor numbers jumped from around 1 million in 1995 to over 40 million by 2019. Buildings were reconstructed to look "ancient." Concrete structures got wooden facades. The waterway system, once functional, became purely decorative.

The social transformation was even more dramatic. As tourism boomed, outside entrepreneurs offered enormous rents to lease properties from Naxi families who had lived for generations, to convert them into shops, restaurants, and guesthouses. The Naxi owners discovered they could make more money renting out their old family home and living somewhere cheaper in the new town than staying put.

The question behind every street became: who is this for—residents or visitors?

So you see a hollowing out of the local community, especially in the more touristy area of town, that makes it feel like a theme park. Nobody actually lives there anymore. It exists for the consumption of tourists.

Shaxi's Different Path

When Shaxi hit its crossroads in 2001—being added to the World Monuments Watch List of 100 Most Endangered Sites—it took a different approach. Squatters had taken over much of the village, and many of the buildings had decayed to the point of collapse.

In 2002, the Jianchuan County's government partnered with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich (ETH) to launch the Shaxi Rehabilitation Project. Jacques Feiner, who led the project, had previously worked on Yemen's ancient city of Sana'a. The brief was clear: restore, don’t rebuild, using traditional techniques and materials.

The project organized the work into six practical areas:

1. Marketplace restoration - Fixing the historic market square that hosted the weekly market

2. Historic village preservation - Maintaining the residential areas where people actually lived

3. Valley-wide sustainable development - Not just the pretty center, but the entire economic region

4. Sanitation improvements - Basic infrastructure like sewage and water systems

5. Poverty alleviation and cultural preservation - Ensuring locals benefited economically while keeping traditions alive

6. Knowledge sharing - Documenting methods to help other villages facing similar challenges

Huang Yinwu, a local architect, became co-director of the overall restoration project, ensuring knowledge transfer happened both ways. Traditional craftsmen were hired as teachers, not just workers.

This meant painstaking work: hand-cleaning 400-year-old beams, re-learning forgotten mortise-and-tenon joints, sourcing the right kind of local clay for rammed earth walls. If a carved bracket was 70% intact, they repaired the 30% instead of replacing the whole.

Twenty Years Later

We visited Shaxi after some days in Dali, and we immediately noticed how beautiful this place was. Water is everywhere. It flows through the original canal system—not as decoration but as actual infrastructure. Most walls are made from rammed earth or clay bricks, patched and re-patched over centuries, each repair visible.

And of course, there are cafes and boutique hotels, but they don’t dominate the town, they’re more dispersed. Turn a corner and you might find a trendy coffee shop (as we did and had very good pour-over with Yunnanese beans), but turn another and you're on a cobblestone residential street. Some alleyways have no shops at all.

We spent hours walking through the town, eating mushrooms (the specialty of the region), and observing the painstaking restoration of the buildings. We then rented a scooter and explored the neighboring villages across the river.

Shaxi isn’t safe from overtourism though. The pressure to become another Lijiang grows each year. The C-drama "Meet Yourself" was filmed here, sparking a significant tourism boom. Every social media post brings more visitors.

The Shaxi Principles

1. Restoration shapes outcomes: how you fix a place determines what it becomes.

2. Keep locals in the loop: community control prevents hollow preservation.

3. Diversify income: tourism should supplement, not replace livelihoods.

4. Friction helps: a little distance and inconvenience can be protective.

5. No people, no heritage: buildings without residents become museums—or malls

China is now trying to protect what it once erased (in the Cultural Revolution). The government runs a national program to conserve traditional villages; as of 2023, over 8,000 have been listed for protection.

This means hundreds of potential Shaxis or Lijiangs.

The lesson isn't that tourism is evil or that development should stop. It's that the choices made at critical moments—who controls development, what philosophy guides it, who benefits—determine whether a place maintains its character or becomes a caricature of itself.

In a world where any village can go viral overnight, the Shaxi model shows you can welcome visitors without turning into a theme park.

postscript 📮

Consider this an introduction to my next essay on vernacular architecture. Yes, there will be even more badly shot photos.

• Which trade-off will you personally accept to keep places authentic (i.e. beautiful, with actual residents, offering a window into another way of life): higher prices, fewer conveniences, or more difficult access?

• What’s the most beautiful place you’ve visited that has been ruined by over-tourism?

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I got some comments on my last post saying something along the lines of “well, this is cool but you can only do what you want if you have a lot of money” and “sure, but no one has that amount of freedom, we all have to work to pay our bills”.

First off—thank you for responding to my essays, this is why I do this! But I don’t want my perspective on agency to be understood as a superfluous take of “just be rich.” Let me clarify.

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The glaring truth we all ignore is this: We have a limited amount of time on this miraculous little planet. Isn’t our most important task in life deciding what to actually do with it?

This might feel too big or self-indulgent, and maybe that's why people jumped to believing the question isn't for them because they're not rich enough or don't have any free time.

I’m asking the question to you, not a Saudi prince or a Manhattan neurosurgeon. You, with your exact bank account, your specific skills, and your particular insecurities. This is about your life.

We all have constraints but we have influence

The problem is thinking you can’t change anything because you can’t change all of it.

We need to take responsibility for the lot we were given. Yes, it’d be easier if you were born into a lot of money, or you had the most supportive family, but we can’t control that. Each of us plays the game of life with a different handicap. The first step is accepting the constraints we were born with. The second is accepting that we can influence them.

I’m not saying change them entirely, but each action you willingly take will affect the next one and so on. Your life will look very different depending on what you choose to do. I'm reminded of Wait But Why's diagram showing how each choice creates a branching path of possibilities.

When you realize that you are responsible for your life, for your time, for your actions, every decision counts.

By doing what you want, I don't mean having unlimited freedom, I mean having the opportunity to choose what will eventually tie you down. We all choose stuff that limits our freedom: a job, a partner, having a kid, learning Japanese, giving up carbs. The paradox of commitment is that we feel freer—and our days feel more intentional and purposeful—after consciously choosing what ties us down.

Ask yourself if you are where you’d like to be. What's the thing you keep postponing? Not the abstract dreams, but the specific changes you know you need to make. The conversations you're avoiding. The habit that's making you feel depleted or anxious. The decision you've been sitting on for months. Start there.

What matters is how you spend your ordinary days. In the end, your life is mostly a collection of weekdays. Are you just getting through them, hoping they are over quickly, waiting for your “real life” to start?

Stop being your own Salieri

Remember the movie Amadeus, about Mozart’s life? The movie is actually about Antonio Salieri, a more mediocre composer driven mad with jealousy over Mozart's genius, secretly sabotaging him while being tortured by how amazing his music is.

We are all Salieri at one point.

We meet a “Mozart”. A person we know publishes a brilliant book, lands a dream job, or launches a cool start-up. Their success isn’t just impressive, it feels personal to us because we had a similar aspiration.

We slip into Salieri mode. We fixate on the other’s success and start comparing ourselves: Wow. But I work harder. I’m more talented. Why them? The inner dialogue turns from admiration to comparison to envy.

We conclude that it’s too late for us, that the whole game is rigged, that we actually didn’t want to do that. We defer the dream another month, another year, until it becomes a ghost in the attic. Envy is safer than action, and wallowing there, we create more excuses of why it’s impossible for us to even try.

The postponement (or outright denial) of our aspirations slowly corrodes other dreams because we start believing the lie that we are not capable. Every new idea we have, or successful person we meet is met with an ever growing resentment.

The resentment, of course, is at ourselves. Deep down, we had the same impulse, we just didn't act on it. And that knowledge eats at us. We tell ourselves we weren't good enough to have what we wanted, even though we never actually tried. In your 20s you tell yourself you have time; in your 60s, the regret of missed opportunities becomes crushing.

The Salieri impulse thrives on the myth that genius (or success) is a zero-sum game. A co-worker’s success is not evidence of our inadequacy. A neighbor's wealth doesn't prevent us from growing our own income. A talented colleague's brilliance doesn't steal from our own. Talent isn't rationed out in fixed portions.

The most important thing is self-trust. The decision to honor the aspirations we have and try our best to achieve them. Even if we don’t succeed, we were courageous enough to act. There’s no resentment there.

The sad fact is that we are our own Salieri to our own Mozart. Every impulse toward genius, toward out-of-the-box thinking, toward ambition, we sabotage it ourselves.

We can tell ourselves we’re not rich enough, not free enough, not talented enough, but life keeps pitching.

So let your inner Mozart go wild. Swing the bat. Miss spectacularly. Swing again.

I’m out of metaphors, but you get it.

Stop waiting.

postscript 📮

• Are there any Mozarts out there that you can change your relationship to?, i.e. Who in your life is living the career/relationship/lifestyle you secretly want? Have you ever asked them how they did it?

• What’s the thing that you have been planning for a while but haven’t taken action?

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I’m all over the place, I know. I’ve written about gentrification, trees, death, taste, and Nietzsche. But I want to show that there’s some method to the madness: there are guiding threads that connect most of my essays.

Richard Feynman recommended keeping about a dozen of your favorite problems constantly in your mind. That way, whenever you learn something new, you could test it against each of your problems to see if it helped solve them.

I love that framing because it allows me to go wide while maintaining some coherence. Now, I don’t consider all of them problems, more like questions or themes, and they’re not 12, but you get the idea.

My big themes seem to orbit around human flourishing in a time of institutional stagnation and technological transformation—i.e. how to live a good life when AI is eating the world, we outsourced meaning-making to algorithms, and nobody agrees on basic facts anymore.

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These are my favorite problems:

Institutions no longer work, how can we improve them?

• How do we transform or replace stagnant institutions to serve our techno-social reality (rise of AI, multipolar world order, extremism, climate weirding)?

• Work: Jobs are where we spend one third of our lives. How can we make them more exciting and meaningful?

• Education: Schooling is mandatory in over 165 countries. How do we improve education so that kids learn how to be independent thinkers and doers?

• Governance: With the rise of autocratic leaders and populism, is democracy still the best governance system? How can it be improved? What other systems are there?

• Ecology: How can we grow our economy and lift people out of poverty in a regenerative way, without destroying the world’s biodiversity?

Beliefs have consequences

• How does culture shape us, and how can we reshape culture?

• Culture’s influence on values and behaviors

  • The brainrot crisis

  • The polarization/extremism crisis

• Moving from nihilism to optimism and sincerity

• How to build communities of empowerment

Agency is fundamental

• How do we cultivate individual and collective agency in a fast-changing world (especially with the rise of AI)?

• What do you want to do with the limited amount of time you have on this planet? How do you want to live? Where do you want to spend your energy and focus?

• No one will grant you the permission to do what you want. You have to take it.

• Who controls the stories we tell about what's possible, and how do we reclaim that narrative power?

• Breaking free from institutional/cultural expectations

New experiments in living

• How do we organize ourselves for collective flourishing?

• The role of community in creating purpose and meaning

• Third spaces and IRL communities

• Internet-enabled communities: network states, pop-up cities

• Place-making and cities

• Touching grass: homesteads, permaculture, retreats

• Re-appreciation of crafts, blue-collar works, leisure

• Embedding curiosity and optimism

Making sense of the world

• In an era of information overload, how do we determine what's true and what matters?

• How can old thinkers and great books help us craft meaning?

• Meaning-makers will become important leaders

• Use history to understand the present

• Intergenerational wisdom

Develop personal mastery

• How do I develop a unique POV regarding a wide arrange of topics without years of specialization?

• How can I create a lifelong system for continuous creativity?

• How do I achieve growth, success and impact without burning out or selling out in the process?

• How to build lasting connections across time/location?

Basically, I want to understand how we built our current human institutions and how we can re-build them for the 21st century. No biggie.

postscript 📮

There’s a lot on my mind, huh?

• Anything that resonates here?

• What are your favorite problems?

  Leave a comment

What do you do is such an innocuous question, usually blurted out in casual conversations. It is absolutely in the realm of “small talk”. Yet, if taken seriously, it can be quite deep.

There is a tension whenever I am politely asked this question. There is what I do for money. Then what I do for fun. What I do for my wellbeing. It is an all encompassing question that confronts us to reflect on how we spend our days.

Our job is where we spend one third of our lives in. Imagine you start working at 20 and retire at 75. That’s 26,400 hours devoted to an activity.

What do you want to do with your time? What is the crazy thing you’d love to tackle or learn about? For what are you willing to sacrifice your time for? These questions might sound too lofty and vague. But if we analyze them, they are simple guide posts. They point the way.

Why are we so busy and distracted from meaningful pursuits?

Because we’ve internalized the seemingly innocuous idea that life is a straight line going in a single direction. You choose path A and stay on it. This has wreaked havoc in the lives of many.

It implies that all decisions must make sense, must be filtered by what has happened before, and be a continuation of the path we chose.

What if there’s no given path? What if it's an exploration?

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Se hace el camino al andar1

I'm in Bangkok as a last hurrah before I have children but I'm also here to plan my second act. Once I go back to Mexico I'll be starting a new project, maybe more than one, and none will be related to what I did before (more on that later).

I like to not be boiled down to a single “profession”. Just as dangerous as the idea of a single path, is the idea of a single identity.

I am more than what my last job was.

I’ve had trouble accepting this because society values stability, legibility and coherence. Yet that coherence can become rigidity because we see our lives as a line. We assume we can’t do something new or different because we’ve been doing something for a while already. Call it sunk cost fallacy.

We can change more often and more boldly than we give ourselves credit.

Were you a doctor but now want to bake sourdoughs and open up a bakery? Go ahead. Were you a nonprofit worker and now want to study programming and work in cybersecurity? Please. Were you a journalist and you got into crypto and now work with Vitalik Buterin?That’s amazing!

All of these are actual people I know.

There's so much randomness and serendipity in the world that we constantly try to downplay so we have a coherent narrative of ourselves and of what we’re supposed to do—the normal path.

The entire premise is a ridiculous one: that you, as a 17 year old without any life experience and without never having had a real job, have to decide what your professional life will be, based on years of schooling that taught you “subjects” abstracted from the real world. How are we not seeing this?

If we give ourselves into what we find interesting and exciting and let our curiosity be the guide, our opportunities will increase tenfold. Our options to do work we find meaningful will increase as well. And this is not just naive Santi talking—openness, tinkering and connection will be values we will need to thrive in a post-AI world.

The stories our parents told us because their parents told them don't really matter anymore.

In front of us we have a forest with glimpses of ways forward. Only when we see our life in hindsight will we make sense of the many trails we carved.

postscript 📮

• What is easy for you that’s hard for others?

• If your current job paid half of what you earn now, would you still do it?

• What’s the highest leverage you can take doing what you do?

  Leave a comment

Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace el camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante no hay camino
sino estelas en la mar.

If you’re reading this on email, click the title to see the photos in full resolution on Substack. Part 1 and 2 are here:

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Le Jardin Secret

Marrakech, Morroco

Le Jardin Secret was built as a riad in the early 19th century by Kaid al-Hajj U-Bihi, head of the Haha tribe. It later became home to Mohammed Loukrissi, head of Marrakesh's watchmakers guild, who lived here with his three wives until his death in 1934. After decades of abandonment, the riad underwent eight years of meticulous restoration beginning in 2008, renovating not just the gardens but the ingenious khettara—an 11th-century underground irrigation system that channels water from the Atlas Mountains through tunnels to the city's mosques, hammams, and select privileged riads.

Stepping through the doorway feels like entering an oasis—the chaos of vendors shouting prices and mopeds honking replaced by the sound of water trickling through marble channels. I sit at the fountain in the middle and take it all in. The garden follows the classic chahar bagh design, with four quadrants divided by water channels, which represent the four rivers and gardens of paradise in Islamic text. The water channels are not only decorative—the same water also feeds the house, with water rills raised above the planted beds so they can spill over and irrigate the pomegranates, dates, and orange trees.

Unlike national or palace gardens built for show, Le Jardin Secret operates at a human scale, that’s what I love about it. This was a grand riad yes, but it was still a house where a family lived. The garden captures what made these riads work as social spaces: intimate enough for daily life, formal enough for receiving guests, and everywhere that careful balance between symbolism and domestic function.

I imagine how centuries ago, in the dense maze of Marrakech’s medina, these hidden gardens weren't escapes from the city but the city's hidden souls—private worlds where architecture, water, and plants merged into spaces for both relaxation and everyday living.

Vergelegen Estate

Western Cape, South Africa

I took my friends to the Vergelegen Estate for a wine tasting and to enjoy the views of the enormous estate. This is, after all, a 3,000-hectare property with 17 formal gardens, a nature reserve with cleared fynbos, and a working wine farm producing some very tasty wines. But I had ulterior motives, I really wanted to see some really really old trees.

Vergelegen Estate was established in 1700 by Willem Adriaan van der Stel, then Cape Governor, who transformed 150 hectares of barren land into what he envisioned as a model farm—complete with irrigation systems, cattle stations, orchards, and half a million vine stocks. Van der Stel planted five camphor trees between 1700 and 1706, which still stand today as 320-year-old giants.

Standing beneath the camphor trees, time becomes visible—their trunks so massive you'd need eight people holding hands to encircle them. The cool thing is these aren't the only ancient bad boys here: there’s a 300-year-old English oak (believed to be Africa's oldest) and an Outeniqua yellowwood from the same era. These trees are older than the United States, older than Mozart, and sprouted when Louis XIV ruled at Versailles and pirates ruled the Caribbean seas. That’s pretty cool.

Sipping a rosé and a red on the terrace with amazing views to the mountains, and watching families walk around and picnic in the gardens, I can’t help but give Vergelegen the award for the most beautiful vineyard I’ve ever been to. And it captures what makes South African wine country unique—this layering of deep colonial history with the Cape’s raw beauty, all in a hospitality melting pot.

Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

The Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden was founded on June 13, 1808, by Dom João VI, the Portuguese prince regent who had fled Napoleon's invasion and established his court in Brazil. Originally created as an acclimatization garden for economically valuable spices from the East Indies (nutmeg, cinnamon, pepper), the garden evolved into one of the world's most important research centers for tropical botany and conservation. Today, the 140-hectare UNESCO Biosphere Reserve houses over 6,500 species across landscaped gardens and preserved Atlantic Forest, with collections including 900 varieties of palms, thousands of orchids and bromeliads.

I went to the garden to see the famous Victoria amazonica water lilies whose leaves can reach six feet in diameter and support the weight of a small child. They’re pretty cool to look at, and apparently they smell nice too—their white flowers release a pineapple-y scent. Walking down the Avenue of Royal Palms, I kept craning my neck at those 30-meter sentinels planted in perfect rows, and I got why this became the model for botanical gardens worldwide. The palms frame views of Christ the Redeemer on Corcovado Mountain above, while behind you have the preserved Mata Atlântica— the second largest moist forest area in the world. I even saw toucans fly by. It honestly felt too pretty.

The garden doesn't fight Rio's spectacular geography but collaborates with it. Rio is already one of the most absurdly beautiful places in the world, with its Sugarloaf Mountain, sandy beaches, forest spilling down granite cliffs. The garden simply frames the views while showcasing the amazing diversity of Brazilian flora. It’s such a great place to sit at a bench, look around and process the fact that you're in a city where such beauty is just normal, like there’s people reading their newspapers and running errands while this piece of the world has these palm trees, these bromeliads, this two-hundred-year-old Brazilwood tree, the literal tree that gave Brazil its name, nearly extinct from overexploitation, now protected and blooming in the garden while people grab their morning coffee. Crazy.

postscript 📮

• What's the oldest tree you've seen?

• Which garden would you revisit tomorrow?

• How many plant photos are currently clogging your phone?

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