My major learning from 2023 can be found in Miyamoto Musashi’s “Dokkōdō”:

Be indifferent to where you live.

Miyamoto Musashi

I shouldn’t allow myself to become overly attached to a specific location or let my happiness be dictated by my surroundings. If my home country treats me poorly, I shouldn’t feel obligated to stay. However, I also shouldn’t expect to find happiness by moving somewhere else in the world. I can find contentment wherever I choose to live. After all, living is living, regardless of the location.

Over the past 2 years, I have really come to understand what I believe to be the most important pillar of a functioning society:

A large, harmonious, loving family.

In the western world, we grow up and often have the urge to move out of our parents’ home as soon as possible. I think it is a natural and healthy urge.

It reminds me of the story of Abraham (Genesis 12:1) where God says, “Leave your country, your family, and your father’s household for the land I will show you.

It is something I did as soon as I graduated from high school, and it led me to Australia, on the other side of the planet. An urge that brought me to Tenerife, also thousands of kilometers away from my family. And I also believe that it is this natural urge that motivates us to travel the world.

My life so far is a mirror of the story of the prodigal son told by Jesus in the book of Luke (Luke 15:11), where a son leaves his father’s house, squanders his inheritance in a distant land, and then decides to return home. Upon his return, he is warmly welcomed by his father.

It is only by leaving our own country, our own family, that we can see our own country and our own family with much-needed clarity. It allows us to appreciate — and it allows us to criticize, to return and to improve.

Distance brings that much-needed clarity. Clarity to honor your family and your homeland. Clarity to truly understand one of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:12): “Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord, your God, is giving you”.

Attending my best friend’s wedding and being generously hosted by his family introduced me to the concept of Silat Al-Rahm, an Islamic practice of maintaining strong family ties — similar to, but even deeper than, this commandment. My friend also left his native Uzbekistan to study and live in Germany, only to return to his family. Despite all the opportunities he could have had in Germany, he moved back. And when I visited him, I could feel how his noble personality really blossomed when he connected with his relatives, met them, and helped them.

Silat Al-Rahm includes actions such as greeting, socializing, caring for relatives, providing financial and personal help, and upholding their honor.

The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) is reported to have said, “Whoever wants to have more income (Rizq) and to leave a better legacy (or a better life), he must connect with his Rahm.

Hinduism also views family life as a sacred activity and an important environment for passing on dharma (karma) from one generation to the next.

As recently as two years ago, I felt that I needed some distance from my family to protect myself and especially my children from generational trauma and beliefs.

But I learned that by seeking distance from our family, we create an even greater distance within ourselves. We cannot heal generational trauma by running away from it. No matter how great the physical distance, we are always connected to our family on a metaphysical level.

We are one.

There is an inherent unity, a deep connection between all beings – especially to our family.

This unity and interconnectedness is found in many spiritual and philosophical traditions: the Buddhist teachings of interdependence, the Hindu concept of Brahman, the Christian idea that all believers are united in Christ, and the Islamic concept of Tawhid: the indivisible unity of God.

In the face of deep – possibly generational– trauma or intense conflict within the family, love and unity for one’s family may seem impossibly difficult.

Gaining some distance – as in the story of Abraham or Luke – gives us the ability to uplift ourselves, to gain the much-needed clarity and strength to return to and unite with our family.

A story found in both the Bible and the Quran is that of Joseph or Yusuf. Joseph’s/Yusuf’s brothers sell him into slavery out of jealousy. He later rises to a position of power and is able to forgive his brothers and provide for them during a famine, demonstrating the power of forgiveness and reconciliation within families.

The Tao concept of Wu Wei (non-action) can help to forgive and achieve family reconciliation. We leave behind the big list of how our family “should be” and accept them as they are.

By practicing loving kindness to everyone around us, we will eventually find ourselves in a paradise of unconditional love.

We are all one.

From its inception, everything we could browse on the Web — text, images, video — was created by human creativity and thought. Anything written or created had to pass a quality standard test we might call proof-of-work: you had to do the work (think, write, publish) to put content on the web.

In the last 12 months, that proof-of-work has been broken. You can now write entire blog posts and books with LLM like ChatGPT. Not surprisingly, an increasing amount of content on the web is now written by LLM — not by humans.

There is nothing wrong with AI content per se, the question is whether we want to know if an article was written by AI without being labeled as such. I prefer to know.

There’s a difference between someone who sits down for many hours and does the hard work of carefully crafting an article using their own thinking and creativity, and an article that’s automatically generated by an AI tool.

We are at a crossroads where it makes sense to think about how we can design a web for the AI age. How can we redesign the web to distinguish between authentic human-generated content and machine-generated content? I am against regulation, and creating a separate web just for humans sounds promising but impractical.

Perhaps we could use the proof-of-work required for human-created content to create an algorithm that confirms the authenticity of human-created content. Authors who created content using such software could then use a label that identifies their work as authentically human. Think of it like an organic food label.

I’m sure that closed publishing networks or sites will emerge that will place a unique label on authentically human content. It is time to design and launch them.

For over one and a half years did I now live in a very sunny but very unambitious place. Over the past six to nine months, I complained a lot about the latter. When I did, many people claimed a correlation to the weather:

Ambitious regions are not sunny – and sunny places are not ambitious.

At first, I was convinced. Spain, Italy, and Greece are all countries not blessed with ambition.

But I quickly realized that this is a flaw.

Firstly, some of today’s most ambitious regions are located in fairly sunny places: Silicon Valley, Shenzhen, Singapore, Hong-Kong, Dubai, Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, Miami, Austin, Amaravati, and many more are upcoming.

Secondly, historically we saw the most advanced societies and many inventions coming out of very sunny regions:

1. The Mesopotamian Empire, located in the sunny region of the Middle East, is often credited as the cradle of civilization. It was here that many fundamental elements of modern society, such as written language and agriculture, were first developed.
2. The Egyptian Empire, situated in the sunny and arid region of North Africa, was a hub of innovation and wealth. It was known for its advancements in architecture, mathematics, and medicine.
3. The Persian Empire, another sunny region in the Middle East, was known for its wealth and cultural advancements. It was a center for the arts, technology, and science.
4. The Roman Empire, which spanned across sunny regions in Europe and the Mediterranean, was known for its engineering marvels, legal system, and advancements in arts and literature.
5. The Byzantine Empire, headquartered in modern-day Turkey, a region with a sunny climate, was known for its wealth derived from its strategic location controlling trade routes between Europe and Asia. It was also a center for arts, technology, and science.

Long story short, there is no correlation between ambition and weather. Rather, I assume it is a phenomenon of the rise and fall of nations. Today’s unambitious regions have all once been powerful empires. At their height, the mentality of the people changed from ambitious to comfortable. And with comfort came the decline. This comfort ingrained itself heavily into their culture, which now obstructs these regions to rise into ambitious and prospering regions. It seems hard to switch from comfort to ambition – yet with enough hardship and the right leadership it seems possible.

In a globalized world, we can luckily choose where we want to be. We can decide to move to more ambitious regions. By doing so, the ambitious atmosphere in these regions will infect us as individuals and allow us to become the best version of ourselves. 

I believe that many couples who successfully used a dating app to find their soul mate did so with a sincere conscious or subconscious intention. This sincere subconscious intention created vibrations in the quantum field. This allowed two souls to connect telepathically. The app was then merely the technology that brought those two souls together in our reality.

One, a country should not treat another nation in a way they would not like them to treat them.

Two, not abiding by this rule is a guarantee for disaster.

Three, when a nation violates this rule, everyone has a moral obligation to demand righteousness.

Four, when a country makes it acceptable to bomb civilians unfairly, it is putting its own country at large at risk.

What we focus on today, as individuals and as a society, determines where we’re going. It determines how our future and the future of our children will look like.

Today, our collective focus is stuck in wars, conflicts, economic recessions, inflation, housing costs, gender debates, and much more dividing nonsense.

This all distracts from where our attention should be: a positive, peaceful, progressing, free, abundant, and united future.

Advancing technologically as well as spiritually.

The most I can do individually is to focus my attention on a desirable future

This means recognizing but minimizing the fear and anxiety inducing political chaos.

It means focussing my energy on an ethical and exciting future. Because:

Where attention goes, energy flows.