# www.mo-issa.com > llms-full.txt for https://www.mo-issa.com — 50 pages, full content, generated 2026-09-04 ## Blog ### The Smiling Buddha and the Borrowed Desire Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog Description: Explore Mo Issa’s blog for thoughtful articles on purpose, transformation, and authentic living. Stay inspired to make meaningful changes today. No results found Mo Issa 27/08/2026 Mo Issa 27/08/2026 The Smiling Buddha and the Borrowed Desire With a cigar in my mouth, the Aegean Sea in front of me, I look away from my laptop towards where the endless sea meets the sky. I can feel the breeze across my neck, my back, my shoulders. Read More Mo Issa 20/08/2026 Mo Issa 20/08/2026 If We Can’t Outrun Death, Then What? Am I subconsciously telling GOD that here I am, listening and practising every life hack, so that He might give me a pass? The irony is that all the optimisation I have done buys no guarantee. I can never outrun death or know the day that I will die. Read More Mo Issa 13/08/2026 Mo Issa 13/08/2026 All This God Business Belief is a proposition you assent to. But belief was never what I had, which is why the question Do you believe in God was unanswerable rather than merely difficult. Wrong verb. Read More Mo Issa 06/08/2026 Mo Issa 06/08/2026 Small but Deep Living from the inside out means guiding your actions, choices, and sense of worth by your internal values and authentic self, rather than reacting to external stressors, opinions, or circumstances. Read More Mo Issa 30/07/2026 Mo Issa 30/07/2026 How I Use AI — and How I Don't Substack just introduced a new restriction around AI. They’ve brought in a software called Pangram that checks whether a piece of writing is fully human, or AI-assisted, or AI-written. Read More Mo Issa 23/07/2026 Mo Issa 23/07/2026 A Better Story Isn't Change Recently I came across James Hillman, a psychologist who, with the writer Michael Ventura, wrote a book in 1992 called We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse. His argument: early in the history of modern psychology, we decided the soul lives inside our skin. Our feelings are ours. Our childhood is ours. Our wounds belong to us privately, inwardly, and the work is always to go in and find them. Read More Mo Issa 09/07/2026 Mo Issa 09/07/2026 The Freedom You Can't Buy The nervous system runs on novelty. Whatever becomes permanent becomes invisible. The mansion, the view, the retirement — the brain catalogues them, files them, stops registering them. You worked thirty years for a sunset you no longer see. Read More Mo Issa 02/07/2026 Mo Issa 02/07/2026 Self-Aware, But Not Self-Obsessed All this self-optimisation is making us more self-obsessed. We chase power, property, prestige. We track our metrics. We refine our protocols. And the happiness we’re actually looking for stays exactly where it’s always been — not inside the data, not inside the ring, but in how we feel and who we’re with. Read More Mo Issa 18/06/2026 Mo Issa 18/06/2026 The Shortcut Generation My fear isn’t about AI, or peptides, or people chiselling their cheekbones into an algorithm’s ideal. Read More Mo Issa 03/06/2026 Mo Issa 03/06/2026 THE HYROX Diaries #3-The Finish Line Was Never the Point Every time I bend down to launch the six-kilogram wall ball, I feel my heart racing. The ball is hitting the frame and not being marked. I throw it again. Not marked. Again. The rep counter barely moves. Several minutes pass, and we cross the one-forty mark with only seventeen reps on the board. Read More Mo Issa 07/05/2026 Mo Issa 07/05/2026 The HYROX Diaries #2:What Are You Willing to Suffer For? Friday nights are gone too, in their old form. No dinners out, no late evenings. I learned that lesson from a single ruined Saturday and never needed to learn it again. When an invitation comes in on a Friday now, I decline. Not with resentment — with something closer to relief. Knowing what you’re protecting has a quietness to it. Read More Mo Issa 23/04/2026 Mo Issa 23/04/2026 The HYROX Diaries #1:The Body Doesn't Lie HYROX is a global fitness race that has taken the athletic world by storm in recent years. The format is deceptively simple: run one kilometre, complete a functional workout station, repeat — eight times over. The stations include the ski erg, sled push and pull, burpee broad jumps, rowing, sandbag lunges, and wall balls. It sounds manageable until you’re on station five with legs that stopped cooperating two stations ago. Read More Mo Issa 31/03/2026 Mo Issa 31/03/2026 A Tale of Two Cats Sassy. Scottish Fold, indoor cat, queen of everything she surveys. She has spotted Pirate through the glass and is doing that thing cats do — back arched, nose wrinkled, a slow hiss that says you do not belong here. On the other side: Pirate. One eye, scarred leg, perpetual hunger. She is not hissing back. She is just looking at Sassy — quietly, almost hopefully — as if some small gesture of approval from this pampered stranger might mean something. Read More Mo Issa 26/03/2026 Mo Issa 26/03/2026 The Haircut But the crazy part is that this wasn’t just a thirteen-year-old thing. It carried through into my adulthood — and when it did, it mutated. The silence didn’t stay silence. What started as a boy who couldn’t speak up became a man who sometimes goes too far the other way. Either I walk away entirely, or I push until I get what I want. Read More Mo Issa 19/03/2026 Mo Issa 19/03/2026 Be Here Now Joseph Nguyen, in his book Don’t Believe Everything You Think, draws this line clearly. Thinking, he argues, is the source of our suffering — not the thoughts themselves, but what we do with them. The spiral. The second-guessing. The relentless inner commentary that turns a moment of clarity into a week of anxiety. He echoes a truth that philosophers and mystics have long understood: we cannot solve our problems with the same level of consciousness that created them. Tactics are temporary. An expansion of consciousness is permanent. Read More Mo Issa 12/03/2026 Mo Issa 12/03/2026 The Consumption of the Soul The philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls the world we’ve built the Achievement Society — a civilisation that replaced external discipline with internal compulsion. Nobody forces you to hustle.You do it to yourself, freely, because you’ve been shaped to believe that relentless production and consumption are the same thing as being alive. We are no longer obedience-subjects, Han writes, but achievement-subjects — entrepreneurs of ourselves, forever optimising, performing, acquiring. Read More Mo Issa 27/02/2026 Mo Issa 27/02/2026 The Cat and the Mountain The deepest growth left might not be another metric. It might be learning how to expand without self-punishment. To pursue progress without panic. To work without worshipping work. To breathe — taped or untaped — without believing that my value depends on the results. Read More Mo Issa 19/02/2026 Mo Issa 19/02/2026 Am I Living A Small Life? A few weeks ago, I binged several episodes of Billions. Both rivals—Axelrod and Chuck Rhoades—live such full lives they barely sleep. They’re on the go 24/7, making moves, closing deals, destroying enemies. At the end of one episode, my heart was beating so fast I couldn’t sleep. Read More Mo Issa 12/02/2026 Mo Issa 12/02/2026 The One Thing We Actually Control I’ve been reading Epictetus, the 2nd-century Stoic philosopher. His words have unsettled me: we control almost nothing. He says, “Some things are up to us, and some are not. Up to us are judgment, inclination, desire, aversion—in short, whatever is our own doing. Not up to us are our bodies, possessions, reputations, public offices—in short, whatever is not our own doing.” Read More Mo Issa 29/01/2026 Mo Issa 29/01/2026 When Utopia Arrives Before Readiness I’ve heard countless predictions about AI and automation. Most wash over me like background noise. But this one landed differently. Maybe because surgery feels so fundamentally human—hands, judgment, years of training, life and death. Or maybe because at 57, I’m old enough to remember when computers couldn’t beat humans at chess, and young enough that I’ll likely live to see machines do everything I once thought made us irreplaceable. Read More --- ### If We Can’t Outrun Death, Then What? Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/outrun-death Description: Am I subconsciously telling GOD that here I am, listening and practising every life hack, so that He might give me a pass? The irony is that all the optimisation I have done buys no guarantee. I can never outrun death or know the day that I will die. If We Can’t Outrun Death, Then What? 20 Aug Written By Mo Issa I.On the 1st of November, 1755, an earthquake of magnitude 7.7 or higher struck Lisbon, Portugal. The churches were full, and thousands of candles were lit to celebrate All Saints’ Day. The shaking went on for more than three minutes; the vaults came down on the congregations, and the thousands of lit candles caused nonstop fires.Men, women and children ran from the churches to the sea. They thought they would be safe there, because they had seen the fissures and the cracks in the ground. Forty minutes later, a massive tsunami came down and levelled them. The number of deaths reached forty thousand or more.The neighbourhood of Alfama sat on bedrock. It remained largely intact and high enough to miss the water, but Baixa, the district below it, sat on the river floodplain. It didn’t survive.The same city. The same earthquake. Only geology mattered.Not faith. Not virtue. Not prayer.II.Europe was shocked by the disastrous events of that day and went into deep reflection.Malagrida, an Italian Jesuit missionary with huge standing at the Lisbon court, published a pamphlet in 1756 insisting the cause was not natural but the sins of the city. He condemned the men for clearing the rubble and rebuilding rather than repenting.Voltaire, the most celebrated writer in Europe, was deeply troubled by what had happened in Lisbon. Within weeks, he wrote the Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne. Three years later came Candide, his most famous work, in which he used the catastrophe to take apart blind optimism and religious fanaticism. The world, he suggested, is chaotic. It doesn’t follow any moral code, and sometimes terrible things happen for no reason at all. By the end of the book, Candide—the protagonist—gives up trying to explain suffering through philosophy or religion. Instead, he tends his garden.Pombal, the King’s chief minister, took control in the aftermath of the disaster by burying the dead and feeding the living. Later on, he sent surveys and questioned parishes so they could rebuild, assuming the earth would move again.Three men asking different questions and acting in different ways.III.I was eight or nine, playing outside in the garden. On the red hardened earth, there was a colony of ants carrying little bits of food. I couldn’t work out what the food actually was. They were streaming towards an anthill. A long line of them. And the thought that came into my mind was that I could just step on them. Like God, I could end them. No reason. Just because my foot was there.I can’t remember what I did, but I think, in the end, I didn’t do anything.I hadn’t thought about this for fifty years. Until now, that is.Perhaps, to the ants, I could’ve been the earthquake.IV.I wear an Oura ring. I wear an Apple Watch. I measure how many hours I sleep. I measure my heartbeat, my body temperature, my VO2. I test a set of specific biomarkers every six months.As much as I can, I adjust things to be as healthy as possible.At 58, I’m readying myself for the next part of my life. I am not going to retire and play golf all day. I don’t want to be a dead man walking. I want to be healthy. I want to be strong. I want to be active. I want to live my life to the fullest.Am I just trying to buy more years?Am I subconsciously telling GOD that here I am, listening and practising every life hack, so that He might give me a pass?The irony is that all the optimisation I have done buys no guarantee. I can never outrun death or know the day that I will die.I could walk out of the door right now, and a bus could hit me. I could be shot by mistake. I could fall out of the sky in a plane. There is no insurance against any of that.But to be honest, I don’t really feel this fear of death. I don’t think about it day-to-day. Even when I read back through my diaries, it isn’t there.Yes, I do feel fear for my kids. Sometimes I worry when they are out late. I still want to know what time they take off and land on every flight.When I had an unusually high PSA result, I got scared that I could have prostate cancer, and for a few days I was genuinely worried. But later results proved the earlier one was false. And within days, I’d forgotten about death.And when my wife went through cancer, I was very afraid for her, but somehow always felt that she would win the battle. And she did win it. Again, a few weeks later, I forgot about my fear of death.In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker says that innately in us there is a terror of dying, and that since the feeling is unbearable at full strength, we build ways to keep it out of mind. He calls this resulting mechanism the ‘vital lie’.That’s why I can’t see the fear of death in my diaries. That’s why we are always looking to do something greater than we are, to leave some kind of legacy. To feel that we mattered.The ring I am wearing. The HYROX I am doing. The Substack I am writing. The novel I want to write. Mentoring my son to take over my company. All so that I can feel that I existed.To outlast death.V.Pombal responded to the 1755 earthquake by building in a new way to prevent earthquakes from causing as much damage. The new Baixa was built with three-dimensional timber frames embedded in the stone masonry to make the structure less rigid and more elastic.He accepted that another earthquake could strike and built accordingly.The Carmo Convent was deliberately left roofless. Never rebuilt. Kept open to the sky.I like that. Not because I want to spend the rest of my life thinking about death, but because I don’t want to forget that I am alive. I will keep working on my health, writing my heart away, building the company, worrying and loving my family, and making plans for years I cannot guarantee I will see.I cannot outrun death. None of us can.But perhaps the answer to the question is not to try. Perhaps it is to know the earthquake is coming, but build anyway. LisbonAll Saint's DayAlfamaMalagridaDeathHealthGodHYROXSubstackCarmo Convert Mo Issa Previous Previous The Smiling Buddha and the Borrowed Desire Next Next All This God Business --- ### All This God Business Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/god-business Description: Belief is a proposition you assent to. But belief was never what I had, which is why the question Do you believe in God was unanswerable rather than merely difficult. Wrong verb. All This God Business 13 Aug Written By Mo Issa I was sitting on the club chair reading Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha when my 11-year-old daughter asked: “Mummy told me that you don’t believe in God?”My face reddened as I put the book down. I was angry at my wife. I was also tongue-tied, as the truth was I still didn’t know whether I believed in God.“It’s not that simple. I’d need a long time to explain.”She said okay, but “What is the book you’re reading about?” she asked.“When you’re old enough, I’ll explain the adventures that Siddhartha took so that he could finally understand all this God business.”She smiled and ran away to play with her friends.My daughter is now 27, and during the past 16 years, I wouldn’t say that I’ve found an answer. Rather, I’ve eliminated many easy ones that seem to satisfy most people.My investigation has been more like via negativa. I’ve cast aside what didn’t work for me. I didn’t want to accept any hard rules, because it was like teaching a student the final solution to a mathematical problem without allowing them time to learn how and why the equation works.Religion works for many, and I’m all for that. However, I personally find dogmatic rules and regulations rather off-putting, stifling even. I couldn’t accept that I must pray five times daily, or fast for a whole month when I hadn’t solved the big issue of whether there is a God in the first place.My parents were devout Muslims, and I saw how well it served them. I can recall my mum reciting the Quran every morning and can still feel the peace that it gave her throughout her day. And when they fasted at Ramadan, they’d be softer, kinder and more compassionate. Not to mention the lovely gatherings we had at iftar and feeling the sense of community which we have now lost.Also, I’d always be humbled by the certainty and hope they both had in life. They felt secure, and no major tragedies fazed them. It’s as if someone had their backs.I never felt that security. Whenever I tried to follow in their footsteps, believing blindly, I felt like a fraud. I’m from the modern era, too scientific and always looking for proof of the divine. I know how hopeless and cerebral I sound, but that’s how I felt.My mum specifically was very upset that my siblings and I did not follow the precepts of Islam. She would, on every occasion, admonish us. My father, more open, would still find ways to pass on the teachings of Islam through well-known scholars and theologians. For a time when I was in my teens, he’d take an hour a week discussing the history and philosophy of Islam.The truth was I didn’t reject Islam or what it stood for. I rejected being handed a solution. I wanted to know how the equation worked and not just that it did.Belief is a proposition you assent to. But belief was never what I had, which is why the question Do you believe in God was unanswerable rather than merely difficult. Wrong verb.During his October 1959 interview on the BBC television program Face to Face, filmed at his home in Switzerland, interviewer John Freeman asked Carl Jung, “And did you believe in God?” followed by, “Do you now believe in God?” Jung paused and replied: “Now? Difficult to answer. I know. I don’t need to believe. I know.”By this, he meant he had seen a power greater than himself at work in his life. He had no need for blind faith. He experienced “God” on a daily basis and knew how to connect with that force.In her book, The Awakened Brain, Dr Lisa Miller defines spirituality as an innate human capacity for perception. She said: “A significant degree of our capacity to experience the sacred and transcendent—one-third—is inscribed in our genetic code, as innate as our eye colour or fingerprints.”Rather than viewing spirituality as connecting to something bigger than ourselves, as I did before, Miller frames it as a perceptual capacity that allows humans to feel loved, held, guided, and never alone.Now, spirituality is not something we do, but rather a perception that happens to us.Even though back in my earlier article in 2017, I explained that I’m spiritual, now I feel that word signifies something I don’t like. ‘I’m spiritual’ was becoming fashionable shorthand for a non-materialistic worldview. The category became a demographic, a market segment, a wellness aisle, a phrase you can now say at a dinner party at zero cost.Spirituality got absorbed by optimisation. Something that always seduces me but takes me towards judgement and competition, a place where my ego comes alive. It’s as if meditating daily makes us better than others who don’t. Or that to be truly grateful, you must write out three things that you’re grateful for every morning.If I meditate because it’s protective against something, I haven’t escaped the achieving mind. I’ve given it better vocabulary. I’ve already written about the wrong rewards in my recent post, The Shortcut Generation.Just imagine how simple it was before, when the Prophet said, “Tie your camel and trust in God.” (The saying was narrated by Anas ibn Malik and recorded in Sunan al-Tirmidhi 2517.)No need for a neuroscience researcher to advocate trust in God.After all the crossing out of ideas towards God, what remains is not reassuring. On one hand, I’m full of hope, and God. But on many others, I’m full of doubts, questions and regularly fall into existential angst.Often when I’m on business trips, like a few months ago in Dubai, I get so taken up by all-day meetings, discussing business, and running to be on time that I quickly fall out of sync and neglect my morning journalling. After a few days, I enter a metaphorical dark tunnel, soulless, lonely, empty, rudderless and worst of all, without hearing the sound of my heart.That’s when I envy the religious ones who believe and trust blindly. They seem to never feel alone. They seem to never be rudderless. They seem to always be in tune with their souls.Whenever I do become hopeless and veer towards nothingness, words and ideas from literary writers, poets and philosophers soothe me. I just have to think of:Seagulls flying in unison. A sunset over the Mediterranean. A dense forest brimming with tall oak trees.Rumi’s field, out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing.Gibran’s earth, delighting to feel your bare feet.Spinoza’s God is not a human-like king sitting in the clouds judging us. Instead, God is the entire physical universe and all its laws combined.Many waves in an ocean, many oceans on this planet, many planets in the galaxy, billions of galaxies.Or with the things I’ve learned to do as I became a writer :Solitude — just me, my thoughts and the vastness that surrounds me, all the noise of the day before settling like coffee residue to the bottom of the cup.A few hours writing, where time and space collapse.Conversations fuelled by curiosity, wit and humour.In a few weeks, I’ll meet Savannah. I’m taking Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha with me to explain to her that today I have moments of knowing and long stretches of nothing, but like Siddhartha, I will continue to investigate all answers to God.I’d like to leave that spirit of inquisitiveness in her. Hermann Hesse SiddharthaHermann HesseSiddharthaReligionIslamChristianityGodQuranMuslimRamadanJohn FreemanCarl JungThe Awakened BrainDr Lisa MillerSpiritualityGod Business Mo Issa Previous Previous If We Can’t Outrun Death, Then What? Next Next Small but Deep --- ### Small but Deep Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/small-but-cheap Description: Living from the inside out means guiding your actions, choices, and sense of worth by your internal values and authentic self, rather than reacting to external stressors, opinions, or circumstances. Small but Deep 6 Aug Written By Mo Issa It’s 5.20 am. I look out of my window, and it’s dark and quiet. I can just about hear the birds chirping. I meditate for ten minutes, then drink my espresso while staring into the yellowing skyline. I feel at peace with myself. A slight smile breaks onto my face.Other days, I wake up, ignore my inner call to meditate, read, and journal, and instead scroll Twitter for the latest news, and end up feeling like shit.I walk this tightrope every day.One where I’m thoughtful and soulful in my quiet mornings, inside out. And another when I’m outside in the world at work or socially, where I switch to outside-in.Living from the inside out means guiding your actions, choices, and sense of worth by your internal values and authentic self, rather than reacting to external stressors, opinions, or circumstances.From experience, I know that living inside out is the best way to reach the inner satisfaction I crave. Whenever I’m in flow, like writing this article, it’s guided by my values: showing up on the page and letting my soul express itself.However, I do fear that our future world is making it harder for us to live a life from the inside out, as more and more, we are being directed by outer pressures.I share Eric Rittenberry’s (from Poetic Outlaws) fears that civilisation is unravelling, and I worry for our kids, though I’m a touch more hopeful.We came into being to have a subjective experience, through our senses, our intellect, our connection to others. All of it is being slowly eroded by the technology that dulls, distracts, and poisons our minds.We need a quiet revolution in reclaiming our authenticity.I truly believe that understanding and metabolising what philosophers, literary giants, and poets have thought is not only soothing but could take us out of the doomsday funk we’re in, to become more whole—to live a quiet life filled with inner fulfilment and outer presence.I want to understand what Rumi meant when he said, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”And when I understand them, transfer my thoughts to the journal, refine them, and publish on Substack, I’m living with courage, authenticity, and meaning. My heart bursts with contentment.A few weeks ago, I started working on my purpose statement. A document that would set an intention rather than finalise my life’s destination.And I immediately thought of Shakti Gawain.She died on 11 November 2018, in California. Her first book sold 7 million copies, and across all her work she sold over 10 million copies. And no national newspaper thought her death was worth an obituary.Gawain could have easily been as famous as other self-help gurus, like Deepak Chopra, who turned his philosophy into an industry, over 90 books, wellness centres, corporate consulting, stadium lectures, the full commercial machine.Instead, she refused to license herself into mass coaching programs, ignoring all the tours and television specials to teach small groups out of her own home.She wanted to keep her influence small but deep.I know that because after I read her book, Creative Visualisation, I looked for a way to work with her directly, but she didn’t offer one-on-one or online coaching.She kept the work small enough that it still mirrored her own inner state. It fit what she taught. In her book Creating True Prosperity, she wrote: “Prosperity is an internal experience, not an external state.”She was doing this not for fame or money, but because she genuinely believed that creative visualisation, a product of her soul’s work, could benefit her clients.Like her, I don’t want to be the charismatic guru who inspires change over a weekend, the equivalent of taking Advil for a symptom while the cause goes untreated.Instead, I’ve realised that transformation is built on slow, repetitive change that must tackle the underlying problem.Even though Gawain and the other self-help teachers probably share similar content. What sets her apart is the delivery: a slow drip, over a whole life, not a weekend high. A small, quiet revolution.Real change, real transformation, needs work. It needs long sessions, three or four hours, going slowly, going deliberately. Repetition in slow terms. That’s the actual machinery of inward change.At scale, depth is mechanically impossible.When writing out my purpose statement, an image of a small solitary tree kept surfacing. I want to be that tree, not tall, but deep-rooted, standing for years, instead of the tall tree with shallow roots that topples after a few seasons.What’s clear for me now is that my writings are first and foremost for me, then a small group who trust and believe that I use the greats’ ideas and my own reflection to decipher why and how to live the good life.I’d rather have what Kevin Kelly called a thousand true fans than a million followers, only a few hundred of whom truly care.With every new technology comes another obstacle. Whether it was the internet, whether it was the phone in our hands, or whether it’s AI now, we are slowly retreating from our soul.I’m 58, I’m well-read, I’ve seen life, I’ve been places, and still, I get stuck every day in this quicksand of a trap set up by powerful experts trying to hijack our attention.What chance do our kids have?In the closing lines of Middlemarch, George Eliot beautifully illustrates the power of quiet influence:“Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive; for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”What’s become clear these last few weeks is that my purpose itself is simple:I want to become who I am in the journal every day, out in the world. I want to do that by thinking and writing with depth, living simply and mindfully, always expressing my inner soul and heart, so that I awaken and I’m in constant flow of my own soul’s work. And if that happens to resonate with others and inspire them to do the same, then why not?And I know that I’ve been challenged, constantly frustrated with the lack of readership. But what’s clear for me now is that I’m in this game of thinking and writing not because I want to change the world.It’s because I want to change me. Small but DeepKevin KellyShakti GawainPoetic Outlawsreclaiming our authenticityself-help gurusProsperity is an internal experience, not an external state. Mo Issa Previous Previous All This God Business Next Next How I Use AI — and How I Don't --- ### How I Use AI — and How I Don't Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/how-i-use-ai Description: Substack just introduced a new restriction around AI. They’ve brought in a software called Pangram that checks whether a piece of writing is fully human, or AI-assisted, or AI-written. How I Use AI — and How I Don't 30 Jul Written By Mo Issa A story called “The Serpent in the Grove,” by the writer Jamir Nazir, won this year’s overall Commonwealth short story prize after first going viral for the opposite reason — critics on social media accused it of showing “obvious markers” of AI use, and the literary magazine Granta withdrew from its long-standing agreement to publish the Commonwealth winners over the controversy. The Foundation reviewed the drafts, the time-stamped documents, the notes, and stood by the writer. Its director-general said they were satisfied the testimony from Nazir confirmed AI hadn’t written it, according to reporting in The Guardian.I haven’t read the short story, but I’ve already unfairly judged the writer. I found myself doubting the legitimacy of the whole review, the Foundation included. I hope I’m wrong about all of that. But the fact that a prize-winning story now needs a forensic paper trail of drafts and timestamps to be believed tells you something about where we’ve landed, whether or not this particular writer is telling the truth.Substack just introduced a new restriction around AI. They’ve brought in a software called Pangram that checks whether a piece of writing is fully human, or AI-assisted, or AI-written.My first reaction was a mix of excitement and fear. The fear part is almost embarrassing to admit: some part of me felt like a kid who’d cheated on an exam, waiting to be caught out, because I have previously experimented with AI in my writing. Which is exactly why my quick judgment of Nazir sits uneasily with me.The excitement comes from my belief that we do need some guardrails for using AI in writing, and I’m so glad Substack is doing so.How I actually use itOver the past few months, I’ve settled on how I use AI in my writing. When I have an idea that I’ve decided to write on, I riff on my phone for about five to ten minutes in a stream-of-consciousness manner. I then upload it to Claude and ask it to make sense of it with remarks and comments, but to use only my words with a reflection at the end.Then using Scrivener (a word processing program)I rewrite what was my first messy draft. This is where I do the heavy lifting, and it’s always without AI.Once I’ve got a proper, legible draft down, I ask AI to act as an editor on three levels. The first, which I’ve only started doing recently, is using it as a thought partner that argues against me. I’ll ask it to counter my own points, find the holes in my thinking, so I can go back and bulletproof the idea before anyone else pokes at it. The second is developmental — does this paragraph earn its place, does the piece actually flow, is there a hole in the structure? And the third is proofreading and line editing.Sometimes, I can use Claude like Google on steroids for some research questions — faster access to the same kind of information I’d have hunted down anyway.To me, AI is a great tool that we can use or abuse. It’s how we choose to use it. I choose to use it as a thought partner and an editor on hand at all hours that enhances my thinking.Where it goes wrongThe danger is what happens when people skip thinking deeply about an idea, prompting and letting the AI do so. What we get is one generically competent voice, multiplied across every corner of the internet. It’s not that AI writes badly. It writes well. That’s almost the problem — it’s smooth, vanilla, competent, and nobody had to sweat to produce it.The whole point of art, craft and the act of creativity is that there should be some human struggle behind it. We’re storytellers because we intuitively recognise each other in a story. We’re not going to feel that same recognition toward something that has no experience of its own to draw from.Also importantly, when you shortcut the effort of writing something — an essay, a book — you miss out on what that effort was supposed to do to you. When I wrote about my Shrooms experience in my memoir, the act of remembering, collecting my notes from that time, putting it on paper, and making sense of the whole adventure was what gave me the true insights.There was a moment I wrote about a cluster of white flowers in the garden: “They had been there for four years, but that was the first time I had noticed them.” I didn’t understand what that line was really about until I’d sat with it on the page — that the whole experience had been about finally noticing what was always there. No prompt would have handed me that. The sitting did.If I’d just narrated my thoughts to Claude and asked it to write it out for me, then I wouldn’t have spent so many hours with my thoughts that finally marinated into my being.When you outsource to AI the deep emotions we go through, then there’s no real change, no suffering, no pain in our writing. And most readers will catch that on the level of the whole piece, over time.Finally, if we allow ourselves to keep using Claude to think deeply for us, not with us, then we let the muscle of thinking wither away — and that muscle is what makes us human. The internet, social media and consumerism have already spent years training us to think less.We can’t allow AI to be the final nail in the coffin.Where I landI’m not a Buddhist, but I resonate with much of its ideology, especially the Middle Way concept. We can have enough discipline not to reach for whatever is easiest without tipping into the other trap of treating the struggle as some virtue in itself.We keep treating the suffering as the toll, the bit you get through so you can reach the writing on the far side. But it isn’t the toll, it’s the writing. That’s where whatever meaning there is actually gets made. Take it away, and you’ll still have your essay, your book, your song. You just won’t have the person who was meant to come out the other end of making it.So for me, I’m going to keep AI close, a thinking partner, an editor, that I can reach at any hour. What I won’t hand over is the one part that was the whole reason for sitting down. The thinking and writing that originates from my mind and heart, and that keeps me alive.But I’m also wary of handing tools like Pangram the final word on what counts as human. They often flag real writing as fake, and let’s remember it was us humans who used the em dash long before AI ever did. aisubstackpangram Mo Issa Previous Previous Small but Deep Next Next A Better Story Isn't Change --- ### A Better Story Isn't Change Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/better-story Description: Recently I came across James Hillman, a psychologist who, with the writer Michael Ventura, wrote a book in 1992 called We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse. His argument: early in the history of modern psychology, we decided the soul lives inside our skin. Our feelings are ours. Our childhood is ours. Our wounds belong to us privately, inwardly, and the work is always to go in and find them. A Better Story Isn't Change 23 Jul Written By Mo Issa Over the years, I’ve been taught that growing in self-awareness comes down to three things. One is daily journaling, sitting down and bleeding your thoughts onto the page. The second is mindfulness, which I know intuitively works, but I’ve never managed a consistent practice. The third is simply talking to people.That could be a therapist, a friend, or family. Or mentors, dead writers, poets, philosophers. For me, whenever I feel listless, I hear Hemingway telling me to get off my butt and follow the action. When I feel completely nihilistic, like nothing is worth living for, I hear Rumi singing his poems.Now for journaling, I’ve been doing this for almost fifteen years, fairly consistently. I try to write down around three pages about both the practical things that happened the day before, but more importantly about what I felt and thought. Like when I came back from a family holiday in the Seychelles, all I could journal about was why I couldn’t be happy while surrounded by magnificent views and the people I love most. It’s like I can only be myself when I am by myself.I’ve caught this pattern before, mid-dinner, mid-laugh, aware I was performing rather than present, and told myself to just relax into the moment. It didn’t work then either. Fifteen years of near-daily pages and the pattern hasn’t moved. So I keep asking myself: does journaling actually work, or does it just give unhappiness better prose?There were two points where I sought professional help outright. The first was in my early forties. My business was about to go under, and I was working through personal issues on top of it. I started having panic attacks. I thought they were heart-related until my doctor told me it was my mind, not my heart.I saw a psychiatrist and agreed to go on antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication. I took them for twelve months. To be honest, they worked. The attacks stopped. I calmed down. I made a point of coming off them on my own terms, and I did. So in this scenario, where the problem was acute, the treatment worked.But when there’s something that’s not so acute, something low-key, mild unhappiness, listlessness, unworthiness, does therapy really work? This happened to me in my late forties. I saw a therapist for a couple of years. She unearthed a real truth: when I left the comforts of Ghana as a boy for a new country, England, and got bullied for being foreign, I learned to defend myself by attacking first.Vulnerability stopped being an option. It was the same instinct that showed up decades later at a villa in the Seychelles, unable to be soft with the people I love most. True, I became more compassionate to myself, but did it change the behaviour? No. I’m still, today, fighting to bring out my softer side into the world.I do believe that therapy is essential for people carrying real trauma, even though this essay isn’t testing that case. What I’m questioning is something narrower. For chronic, low-grade stuff, does insight-based work actually change behavior? My own fifteen years of evidence says not much.Recently I came across James Hillman, a psychologist who, with the writer Michael Ventura, wrote a book in 1992 called We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse. His argument: early in the history of modern psychology, we decided the soul lives inside our skin. Our feelings are ours. Our childhood is ours. Our wounds belong to us privately, inwardly, and the work is always to go in and find them.But what gets left out of the picture, he says, is the world itself, the actual, physical, civic world we live inside of. He’s saying the buildings are sick, the institutions are sick, the streets are sick. We’ve obsessed over the inside and ignored what the outside is doing to us.I think he’s onto something. Today the noise from outside is incessant. Algorithms on our personalized feeds serve us outrage before we’ve had coffee. That same curation logic extends to our social circles. We end up surrounded by peer groups that reflect our issues back at us rather than challenge them, and by people too invested in their own comfort to hold us accountable for our inaction.In that serene setting in a therapist’s office or worse on a zoom call, we spend hours identifying how our inner child is sabotaging us, but we walk straight back out to an environment that doesn’t help us see how it’s doing so in the moment.How can I become more intimate with my family? How can I stop being angry with the world that is hellbent on doing so on a daily basis?Sometimes all the self-knowledge in the world won’t help me get out of bed and into action. What gets me there is something smaller, and sometimes more stubborn: a simple decision made in advance, with a consequence attached if I don’t follow through.I think what’s missing from my journalling pages and probably therapy too is when we identify a pattern and understand how the inner child is stopping us from being our true selves, we don’t then ask the next question. What specifically are you willing to commit to doing differently this week? Who is going to know if you didn’t do it? What happens if you don’t?So for me, I don’t think the fix is complicated, even if it’s uncomfortable. Therapy, coaching, journaling need a goal, not just a discovery. It needs someone or something holding you accountable to a specific action. It shouldn’t only be about another, better story of why we are the way we are.And it needs to end each time with an accountability plan: here’s what I now understand, and here’s the one thing I want to do about it, before we even talk again, before I even write again in my journal.Yes, I still journal. I still believe in understanding myself. But I also know now that insight without accountability is just a better story. And if the world outside the room is sick, the way Hillman says, the noise, the feeds, the institutions, that’s a bigger fight than one man with a journal can win. What I can do is smaller.So here’s what I’m asking myself, and maybe you should ask yourself too: what’s the one thing you understood about yourself this week, and what did you actually do about it before the week was over? Mo Issa Previous Previous How I Use AI — and How I Don't Next Next The Freedom You Can't Buy --- ### The Freedom You Can't Buy Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/freedom Description: The nervous system runs on novelty. Whatever becomes permanent becomes invisible. The mansion, the view, the retirement — the brain catalogues them, files them, stops registering them. You worked thirty years for a sunset you no longer see. The Freedom You Can't Buy 9 Jul Written By Mo Issa I dream of owning a villa on the sea. Ibiza, one of the Greek Islands, maybe far-away Bali. Somewhere I can feel that breeze on my face while stealing glances at the horizon. I tell myself that once I’m there — once I own that view and wake up to it every morning — the restlessness will finally quiet. The striving will soften.I’ll be, at last, enough.But then I remember. Almost ten years ago, I spent a few weeks in Ibiza. The first sunset stopped me mid-sentence — the kind that makes you feel, just briefly, like you’ve cracked the code of living. By day four, I was checking my phone through it. By day seven, it was just the sky doing what the sky does. It quietly became wallpaper. The view was still there. I had stopped seeing it.We tell ourselves we want enough money to be free — free from the alarm clock, the bills, the grind. But look closer at what you’re actually hungry for. It’s not the number. It’s the feeling. And the feeling doesn’t arrive with the money.It never did.The nervous system runs on novelty. Whatever becomes permanent becomes invisible. The mansion, the view, the retirement — the brain catalogues them, files them, stops registering them. You worked thirty years for a sunset you no longer see.So the real question isn’t how much do I need. It’s how do I stay capable of being moved. That’s what’s worth protecting — not the portfolio, not the number, but the raw capacity to feel something, to be alive.That capacity doesn’t grow with accumulation. It takes something harder: the courage to resist what Instagram and TikTok insist you should want, and to remain open to the awe that’s already waiting.The man with nothing who can still be arrested by beauty is living more richly than the man with everything who has gone numb to it all.We’re taught to accumulate — the house, the car, the view, the life that signals arrival. What nobody tells you is that the experience depreciates even as the asset holds. The house in Ibiza doesn’t lose its value on any spreadsheet. But you? Within months you wake up to that same light, that same horizon, and feel nothing. The dream didn’t fail to deliver — your own nervous system quietly consumed it.Whatever becomes constant becomes invisible.That’s the rule nobody models for. The brain is an efficiency machine. It stops spending attention on anything that no longer surprises it. The familiar gets defunded. And so the very thing you spent years reaching for becomes, the moment you reach it, something you can no longer feel.I know this not from philosophy but from my own life. Last year I bought an expensive Lexus — seduced by its beauty, its presence, its quiet authority. For the first few weeks I was captivated. The gadgets, the performance, the way it moved. Now it just gets me from A to B while a podcast plays. That’s all it gives me. A car. Nothing more.How many times have I spent four or five days curating a padel game — the right players, the right court, the right time — only for it to land completely flat? How many times have I left work early, looked forward all day to sitting with a cigar in the quiet, only to find the minute I lit it — nothing. The magic had already gone, somewhere between the anticipation and the arrival.The brain spoils it every time. Not out of cruelty. Out of efficiency. It got what it wanted and moved on before we even arrived.And yet here I am, at 57, still working, still worried, still stressed. I don’t have a clean answer for that. I just know that somewhere along the way I confused the accumulation with the living. I kept building the conditions for happiness and forgot to inhabit them.Simplicity. Presence. Listening to good music without checking your phone. Travelling light. Actually showing up to your own life rather than managing it from a distance. These are the things. Not the villa. Not the exit. Not the number. Anaïs Nin wrote:“You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience.” She’s not talking about gratitude. Not mindfulness. Not a morning routine. She’s talking about staying open enough to be swept — refusing to close, remaining the kind of person who still gets carried away by things. By an idea. By a piece of music. By a conversation that goes somewhere you didn’t expect. The villa is a seawall. Nin is telling you to swim.The dream life was never a destination. It was always a way of inhabiting the present. The question was never when. It’s whether you’re still able to feel it — right now, today, in whatever ordinary Tuesday you’re standing in.I still dream of the villa. But I’m learning that what I actually want is simpler and harder than any property purchase: to never stop seeing the sunset. To stay the kind of person who can be cracked open by light on water, by a melody that arrives at exactly the right moment, by the sudden aliveness of an unremarkable afternoon.To stay, always, at the beginning of things.That’s the freedom. And it was never for sale. NervousFreedombuy Mo Issa Previous Previous A Better Story Isn't Change Next Next Self-Aware, But Not Self-Obsessed --- ### Self-Aware, But Not Self-Obsessed Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/self-aware Description: All this self-optimisation is making us more self-obsessed. We chase power, property, prestige. We track our metrics. We refine our protocols. And the happiness we’re actually looking for stays exactly where it’s always been — not inside the data, not inside the ring, but in how we feel and who we’re with. Self-Aware, But Not Self-Obsessed 2 Jul Written By Mo Issa The first thing I do when I wake up is check my sleep data on the Oura app. If I’ve gotten an hour of REM and close to an hour of deep sleep, something in me settles. I feel the night was a success and that I am on track.But if, as it’s been lately, I get only twenty minutes of deep sleep, then the day hasn’t even started, and I’m already behind. Already I’ve failed at something. I’m playing catch-up to who I’m supposed to be before I’ve had a cup of coffee.At what point does the tool become the thing it was supposed to prevent? At what point does the measurement replace the experience it was meant to improve?I do something similar with the Apple Health app after every walk, gym session, and padel game. I’ve turned my body into a game board — something I can win or lose depending on the numbers.No wonder I’m exhausted most days. Not from the physical activity, but from the constant comparison, which keeps my mind in exactly the restless, peaceless state I’m training it out of.The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen puts it cleanly: “Metrics are useful because they compress information. They are dangerous because they compress information.”The same quality that makes them helpful is what makes them treacherous. You start tracking your sleep to improve your rest. You end up managing your sleep score instead. The lived experience becomes secondary to the recorded one. And slowly, without quite meaning to, you stop being the authority on your own life.Derek Thompson wrote a piece recently called The Cult of the Enhanced Self that named what I’ve been feeling with a precision I found both clarifying and a little terrifying. His central claim: Americans have never been healthier, or more alone.Thompson calls this the Enhanced Self — the shift in medicine, technology, and consumer culture from curing illness to optimising a life that was never sick to begin with. Somewhere in that shift, it seems to have made us a little too fixated on our own health.Push health-tracking far enough, and it stops being a habit and becomes a second occupation — one where, as he puts it, you start acting like the chief executive of your own body.There’s a maxim the business world was built on: you can’t manage what you can’t measure. I’ve run a company by that principle, and there’s real truth to it — the discipline of relying on honest data over a certain feeling has saved me many times from making bad emotional decisions.But it’s a double-edged sword. Measurement quietly displaces presence. You stop asking “how I slept” and start asking “what the ring said”. You stop asking, “How do I feel?” and start asking, “What my numbers are.”It’s genuinely good that we now have the tools to live longer and healthier. I don’t want to pretend otherwise. But somewhere underneath all that progress, I think we’re building toward an optimised life that’s quietly devoid of meaning.All this self-optimisation is making us more self-obsessed. We chase power, property, prestige. We track our metrics. We refine our protocols. And the happiness we’re actually looking for stays exactly where it’s always been — not inside the data, not inside the ring, but in how we feel and who we’re with.The relentless focus on the self does not produce a better self. It produces a smaller one. A self that is its own centre is an airless place to live. The data gets cleaner, and the life gets thinner.Maybe our obsession with health is really the terror of death, dressed up in the language of wellness.When we track our deep sleep percentages, our VO2 max, our heart rate variability, we’re not just trying to feel better in the morning. We’re trying to outrun mortality. We’re doing a kind of lifespan arithmetic — how much time will this cost me, how much will that buy me back?And this is crowding out the very things that make life worth living, leaving us not just tired, but quietly anxious, all in the name of getting healthier.I’ll still check my Oura ring tomorrow morning. I’ll still track my activity on my phone. I’m not pretending otherwise. But I’m trying to let the number be information rather than a verdict.I want to be self-aware but not self-obsessed. Can I want to be healthy without needing a number to prove it? Mo Issa Previous Previous The Freedom You Can't Buy Next Next The Shortcut Generation --- ### The Shortcut Generation Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/shortcut-generation Description: My fear isn’t about AI, or peptides, or people chiselling their cheekbones into an algorithm’s ideal. The Shortcut Generation 18 Jun Written By Mo Issa I’m listening to this song, and it moves me.The man’s voice is in Arabic. Deep, penetrating. The jazz underneath bends it in a way that transforms it. I listened on repeat. Sent it to people. Played it in the car, alone, volume up. I’d light a cigar, smoke for twenty minutes, the song loud, tears running down my face.A few weeks later, I found out it was AI.I didn’t know what to do with that.The song made me feel what it made me feel. My emotions were real. But then I thought more about it, and I felt deceived. No one had toiled for this. No one stayed up all night and bled for it.Yes, someone put effort into prompting the platform. But in the end, it was manufactured. Engineered to come out right.Whether it’s a song, essay, book, or video, the end product isn’t created. It’s generated. Built to catch you, to deliver surface-level dopamine and call it joy.My philosophy is that joy, real joy, follows effort. Follows suffering. We are living in the age of the shortcut.The moment I rode an e-bike in London a few summers ago, I discarded the bicycle. I told myself I wasn’t using it for exercise, just to move quickly. I chose ease over effort. Evolutionary biology tells us we are built to conserve energy. We will always choose less effort over more.The danger is this: the gap between wanting something and having it has collapsed to almost nothing.Want a song? Generate one.Want an essay? Narrate your thoughts and let the machine arrange them.Want a body? Ozempic and Mounjaro suppress appetite, strip fat, and often take muscle with them. And now RETA is coming, a peptide that targets fat without touching muscle. Half the time, same result.Want better cheekbones? People are carving themselves now, literally reshaping bone, chasing a face the algorithm decided is optimal. This is called looksmaxxing. I’d like to call it fringe. I’m not sure I can.Last week, I heard about the Enhanced Games, athletes competing with full permission to use performance-enhancing drugs. The marketing pitch is transparency: no more hypocrisy, no more hiding. But what you’re watching, underneath the branding, is the dismantling of the idea that the body’s limit is the point.Shortcuts are everywhere. I use Claude to write. Not to generate (I want to be precise) but to help.My writing system: I narrate into my phone, give the story, the headings, the experience. I rewrite it on my laptop, changing words as I go, forcing myself to feel every sentence. Then Claude edits. Pushes back. Catches what I missed.Is that a shortcut? I’ve turned the question over many times.What I’ve landed on: it’s a collaboration. The origin is mine. The thinking is mine. The experience is mine. The machine doesn’t give me the feeling. It helps me find the form.But when I heard about that AI song, the first thing that unsettled me wasn’t the song. It was the mirror. Where does your line actually fall? I still don’t know. And I’m not sure the line is as clear as I need it to be. GLP-1s are saving lives. AI songs are somehow moving us. Claude is helping me write better.What’s coming next? A bionic knee that keeps me athletic into my eighties. I can’t say no to that. Genetic engineering that removes a cancer gene from an embryo before birth?The moral dilemma will only deepen.But one belief stays unshakeable: Meaning is made from suffering.Not suffering as punishment. Suffering as the unavoidable fact that the things which matter cost us something: time, failure, uncertainty, the long darkness before you get good at anything. That cost isn’t incidental to the meaning. It is the meaning. The struggle is what makes arrival feel like arrival.When I trained six months for my first HYROX in Barcelona, I crossed that finish line and didn’t just feel tired. I felt like someone. The sum of every early morning, every session I didn’t want to do, every time my body said stop, and I didn’t.Self-knowledge is produced only under pressure.When a writer suffers through an essay, throws drafts out, loses the thread, finds it again at two in the morning, what comes out carries all of that. The reader doesn’t know the history. They feel the weight. There’s a density to earned writing that generated text cannot replicate, because density comes from compression, and you can only compress what you’ve actually lived.This is what we are quietly dismantling.Not just craft. Not just standards. The mechanism by which human beings come to know who they are and what they’re capable of. We are building a world where you can have the output without the process: the body without the training, the song without the years, the essay without the struggle.We call this progress. What we are actually doing is removing the experiences that turn a person into someone with something to say.You want to be a writer? Suffer through writing. A body you’re proud of? Earn it. Music that moves people? Spend the years learning what music actually is. The suffering isn’t the price you pay before you get the thing.The suffering is the thing. It’s where the meaning lives.And without it, you might have the output. But you won’t have yourself. My fear isn’t about AI, or peptides, or people chiselling their cheekbones into an algorithm’s ideal.My fear is quieter. It’s the look on the face of someone who got everything they wanted without earning any of it, who stands there holding it all, and feels nothing. Not happiness. Not pride. A faint, persistent sense that something is missing, with no idea where to look.That emptiness has a name. We call it a meaning crisis, and it is everywhere. People have more comfort, more access, and more capability than any generation before them. And they are more lost.That is not a coincidence. We optimised away the friction that used to produce orientation. The struggle told you who you were. The difficulty told you what mattered. Remove them, and you are left with everything except the one thing you needed.The difficulty was not a bug. It was the point.You cannot optimise your way to meaning.Every time I hear the song now, there’s a shadow over it.It has become a symbol of the meaning crisis, yes, but also of something more personal: my own defiance.A reminder to myself that for meaning to last, there has to be blood, sweat, and tears. AIGLP1shortcutOzempicThe Shortcut GenerationGLP-1 Mo Issa Previous Previous Self-Aware, But Not Self-Obsessed Next Next THE HYROX Diaries #3-The Finish Line Was Never the Point --- ### THE HYROX Diaries #3-The Finish Line Was Never the Point Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/hyrox-3 Description: Every time I bend down to launch the six-kilogram wall ball, I feel my heart racing. The ball is hitting the frame and not being marked. I throw it again. Not marked. Again. The rep counter barely moves. Several minutes pass, and we cross the one-forty mark with only seventeen reps on the board. THE HYROX Diaries #3-The Finish Line Was Never the Point 3 Jun Written By Mo Issa I’m tired.My blood is boiling.I’m at the final station, and my watch says one hour thirty-eight minutes.Every time I bend down to launch the six-kilogram wall ball, I feel my heart racing. The ball is hitting the frame and not being marked. I throw it again. Not marked. Again. The rep counter barely moves. Several minutes pass, and we cross the one-forty mark with only seventeen reps on the board.I have completely lost my head.Everything before this — the running, the sleds, the burpees that took my breath, the rowing, the lunges, the farmers carry— all of it done comfortably, and all of it behind us. We were on course for one hour and forty. I had told my partner we could do it, and I believed it. Eight minutes on a single station.We cross the finish line at one hour forty-five.I am so angry that I didn’t get a good picture at the line.I’m telling you this first because it’s the most honest place to start. And because that anger — petty, specific, completely disproportionate — is actually the point. It means I wanted this more than I’d ever quite admitted to myself.Nine days before the race, the flu arrived.Not a cold. The kind of flu that puts you horizontal and keeps you there — feverish, wrung out, the kind of tired that sleep doesn’t touch.I had just completed my best simulation. Seventy minutes, strong throughout, the finish line finally felt real. I went to bed satisfied in a way I hadn’t felt in months. I woke up unable to lift my head.The training was over — nothing left to do but wait and worry. For the first time since December, the thought that I might not finish this race crossed my mind. What if I couldn’t even start? I’d started to build my identity around those Saturday mornings. Take the race away, and what’s left? The existential weight of that question, lying in Accra with a fever, was its own kind of education.Barcelona arrived anyway.Seventeen degrees, a light breeze, the kind of air that reminds you your lungs exist. We walked before the hotel room was ready. Later in the evening, we had dinner by the sea — red wine, a cigar, the flu still faintly present but ignorable for an evening. Not smart.The next morning’s run, my last activity before the race, confirmed it: four and a half kilometres, hard going, heart rate climbing in ways that worried me. I stood there afterwards more afraid than I’d been all week.For the two days before the race, we kept walking — Barcelona keeps offering the next beautiful street, the next good restaurant, the next reason to stay out. Wednesday night was dinner with the whole group, which I called the last supper. Warm, full of laughter.By the end of it, I was ready, if anything, to get the race over and done with.Race morning. One-thirty pm start — a piece of luck, peak condition time. Mild panic about logistics at the venue, then the music hit, the atmosphere hit, and something shifted. Hundreds of people in various states of anxiety and determination, all of them having made some version of the same decision we made — to choose something hard and show up for it. You cannot stand in that and feel alone in what you’re doing.We paced ourselves well from the start. The key rule we’d learned: two and a half times round the circuit before each station, no more, no less — get it wrong and you earn a penalty. The early stations were manageable. A small hack helped: brief rest at each station, water, a quarter glass of Red Bull. It cost us time in the end, those micro-pauses, but it kept us functional when functional was all we needed.Station four — the burpees — was where I came slightly undone. Lost my breath completely, but recovered over the next kilometre of running. At station five, the rowing, I took an energy gel, and something in my legs woke up.I felt something I hadn’t expected: a surge. Not adrenaline exactly — something deeper, something that had been building through all those Saturday mornings in the Accra heat. The training arrived, finally, exactly when it was needed. I told my partner we could break one hour and forty. I believed it.“The farmers carry felt easy. I was running with the kettlebells. Five months earlier, I couldn’t run a kilometre without stopping.”Then the wall balls. You already know how that went.What I remember most is not my own race.It’s watching R finish the women’s doubles with a composure that made the rest of us look like we’d been making a fuss — every station handled cleanly, effortlessly, as if the months of training had been entirely obvious preparation for exactly this.It’s N&N who spent the whole day being the energy for everyone else — cheering, lifting, pushing us — before crossing their own finish line later on in the evening.It’s the moment we rushed back to the venue — barely showered, barely fed — to reach B&L just before their start, to stand at the barrier and give back a fraction of what had been given to us all day.It’s N, J, M and R supporting us selflessly, even though they were not competing.Somewhere in five months of training, something had happened that the training plan hadn’t scheduled. We had become, without meaning to, the kind of people who show up for each other. Not just on race day. On all the days before it.In the first essay I asked a question I didn’t have an answer to: not can we still do this, but what does it mean that we want to?I think I know now. It means we are not finished. The part of us that chooses hard things is still alive, still restless, still looking for the next staircase. Because the choosing is itself the point. The discipline, the rearranged Fridays, the Saturday mornings in the heat — none of that was preparation for living.It was living.James Hollis, the Jungian analyst whose work has become something close to a compass for me, argues that the real measure of a life is not whether it made you happy, but whether it made you larger. His question — does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me? — is the only test that matters.I signed up on a whim in December. I don’t think it was a whim. I think some part of me already knew the answer — that the five months ahead would make me larger. Not faster. Not fitter, though that too.Larger: more alive to what I’m capable of, more honest about what it costs, more certain that the cost is worth paying.The whispering contentment of finishing and feeling enlarged has stayed with me. Hyroxheartenergytraining Mo Issa Previous Previous The Shortcut Generation Next Next The HYROX Diaries #2:What Are You Willing to Suffer For? --- ### The HYROX Diaries #2:What Are You Willing to Suffer For? Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/hyrox-2 Description: Friday nights are gone too, in their old form. No dinners out, no late evenings. I learned that lesson from a single ruined Saturday and never needed to learn it again. When an invitation comes in on a Friday now, I decline. Not with resentment — with something closer to relief. Knowing what you’re protecting has a quietness to it. The HYROX Diaries #2:What Are You Willing to Suffer For? 7 May Written By Mo Issa No more pre-workout.Coffee and two dates, thirty minutes before I start. A couple more dates mid-session. That’s it. In the last essay, I told you the pre-workout would stop — and somewhere between then and now, without announcement, it did. What I found on the other side was something I hadn’t expected: steadier energy, a more honest read of what I actually have. Some things you think you need turn out to be noise you were paying to hear.Eleven days to Barcelona. This is what the training looks like from the inside now.There was a morning this week I simply could not run.Not low energy. Absent energy. The distinction matters — one is a warning, the other is a bill arriving after months of spending. I lay there long enough to know the morning was gone, took a nap in the afternoon, ran in the afternoon, and somewhere in between overslept through a call with my business coach.Twenty minutes late. I owned it the moment I picked up. But the embarrassment settled into me slowly — not because I’d missed the call, but because I understood what it meant. The training had taken the wheel. I hadn’t noticed until we were already moving.Friday nights are gone too, in their old form. No dinners out, no late evenings. I learned that lesson from a single ruined Saturday and never needed to learn it again. When an invitation comes in on a Friday now, I decline. Not with resentment — with something closer to relief. Knowing what you’re protecting has a quietness to it.This week’s simulation was the hardest yet. Seventy minutes completed; the race will demand closer to a hundred. I wore new shoes — a decision I paid for in unfamiliar knee pain by the final run. The old shoes go back on. Some experiments belong in training. This one was a reminder that race day is not the place for them.Am I ready? I genuinely don’t know.A friend in our group hurt his back on the first day of training, nearly quit weeks later, but he kept going through every rational argument to stop. Today, eleven days out, his back is not 100%, but he’s soldiering on. That single fact has done more for my own resolve than anything I’ve read.Which brings me to what I’ve really been thinking about.Not the race. Not the result. The question underneath all of it, the one this kind of undertaking has a way of surfacing, whether you want it to or not: what are you actually willing to suffer for?It costs nothing to want things. To imagine the finish line, the transformation, the version of yourself that exists somewhere on the other side of the hard work. Everyone wants that. The wanting is free.What separates people — what has always separated people — is not the size of the dream but the willingness to sustain the daily, invisible, unrewarded grind of getting there.Khabib Nurmagomedov put it with the bluntness only he can get away with: “Every man addicted to something. Some smoke, some drink, some waste time. But real man, he addicted to discipline. Discipline no need motivation. Discipline move without feeling. I go anyway — even when tired, even when lonely.”I’ve been turning that over for weeks. We are all addicted to something. The question is whether it’s comfort or the struggle that produces what we actually want. Most of us, if we’re honest, have spent more time worshipping at the altar of ease than we’d care to admit. I know I have.“The voice in your head will always make its case for quitting. Every week, sometimes every day. The work is not silencing it — it’s learning to move while it talks.”Coach Sommer, who trained some of the world’s finest gymnasts, wrote something I wish I’d read twenty years ago: make one decision — a real one, to a long-term goal — and then simply refuse to budge. Not a thousand small daily decisions. Not constant motivation checks. One commitment, protected like something you cannot afford to lose.Because here is the truth about motivation: it is not a reliable fuel. It shows up when things are going well and disappears precisely when you need it most. What carries you through the disappeared motivation is the decision you made before it left — the one that doesn’t require renegotiation every morning when your body is aching and the alarm goes off in the dark.I made that decision in December. On a whim, technically — but the commitment that followed was not a whim. And what I’ve understood, somewhere in the middle of these months, is that the decision was never really about a race. It was about finding out what I’m made of when the conditions are unfavourable and nobody is watching, and stopping would be completely reasonable.There’s a line I’ve kept coming back to on the harder mornings: don’t look at the whole staircase. Just the next step.I have been doing this since January without calling it anything. Week one, I didn’t think about May. I thought about week one. This session, not the race. This kilometre, not the finish. It is the only way something like this works — the full picture, absorbed at once, is designed to make you quit before you begin.What nobody tells you when you sign up for something like this is what comes included in the price. The rearranged Fridays. The missed calls. The mornings when the energy simply isn’t there. The new pains appearing in places you didn’t know could hurt. The slow and humbling discovery of exactly where your limits are, and what it costs — in sleep, in sacrifice, in the quiet daily choosing — to move them even slightly.My legs are stronger than they have ever been. That’s real. But it’s not the thing I’ll carry out of this. What I’ll carry is something harder to measure — the knowledge that I made a decision in December and honoured it through every week that tried to talk me out of it.Goals, I’ve come to understand, are not destinations. They are mirrors. What matters is who looks back.The race will tell me what I can do in a hundred minutes.The training has already told me who I am.—Final Part after the race on 14th May. Hyroxdates Mo Issa Previous Previous THE HYROX Diaries #3-The Finish Line Was Never the Point Next Next The HYROX Diaries #1:The Body Doesn't Lie --- ### The HYROX Diaries #1:The Body Doesn't Lie Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/hyrox Description: HYROX is a global fitness race that has taken the athletic world by storm in recent years. The format is deceptively simple: run one kilometre, complete a functional workout station, repeat — eight times over. The stations include the ski erg, sled push and pull, burpee broad jumps, rowing, sandbag lunges, and wall balls. It sounds manageable until you’re on station five with legs that stopped cooperating two stations ago. The HYROX Diaries #1:The Body Doesn't Lie 23 Apr Written By Mo Issa I’m standing on the side of the road on a Saturday morning in Accra, hands on my knees, the sun already doing its worst at eight in the morning, thirty degrees Celsius and climbing, humidity sitting on my chest like something with weight.I want to vomit.I’m breathing like a man who has forgotten how, and I’m thinking: whose idea was this?Mine. It was mine.I stay bent over for longer than I’d like to admit. Around me, the group keeps moving — or at least they’re pretending to. Someone calls my name. I wave them off.I’m somewhere in the middle of a HYROX simulation that felt ambitious when we planned it and feels delusional now. There are still stations left. There is still running left. The heat is not getting better.I tell myself: just stand. That’s all. Just stand up and start jogging. Let me back up.Somewhere in mid-December — on a whim, which is how most of my better decisions arrive — I decided to sign up for a HYROX race.HYROX is a global fitness race that has taken the athletic world by storm in recent years. The format is deceptively simple: run one kilometre, complete a functional workout station, repeat — eight times over. The stations include the ski erg, sled push and pull, burpee broad jumps, rowing, sandbag lunges, and wall balls. It sounds manageable until you’re on station five with legs that stopped cooperating two stations ago.I didn’t arrive at this through careful research. I arrived at it on a padel court, noticing that my cardio was nowhere near where it used to be. I was fit in the way that a man who lifts weights and plays padel is fit — functional, presentable, but not cardiovascularly fit. Not really.Maybe I wanted to prove something. Maybe I just wanted a deadline, something with stakes. Either way, I signed up. And then, because I am who I am, I pulled in my brother and his wife, my son Nader, his girlfriend, and a handful of friends I knew would be mad enough to say yes.The race is May 14th. In Barcelona — which, if you needed a city to make you commit to something hard, is not a bad choice. What I did not fully appreciate in December was what four months of training would reveal about the gap between who I think I am physically and who I actually am.I used to be a runner. Real running — double-digit kilometres on the roads of Accra, a couple of half marathons, the kind of mileage that builds quiet confidence in your legs.That was before the snowmobile accident. Before the fracture, the surgical fixation, the long road back. And after, the injuries accumulated over years of football, of pushing too hard, of a body that gave generously and eventually sent a bill. Between the damage and the years, I had put running down like something I’d pick back up when the time was right.The time, apparently, is now. And the body has opinions about that.Going back to running after a break that long is not like riding a bicycle. The stamina is gone. The rhythm is gone. The easy relationship between your lungs and your legs — gone. What’s left is the memory of what it felt like, which is almost worse than having no memory at all. You know exactly what you’ve lost. You feel the gap with every kilometre.And we are doing this in Ghana. In the hottest month of the year.This is not uncomfortable heat. This is heat that has intentions. I’d thought training in it would make me stronger — that Barcelona would feel easy by comparison. Probably not, training in this heat doesn’t make you faster. It makes you survive. There is a difference. Nothing prepared me for the Saturday simulations. Three months with an online coach helped — strength first, then running as the race approached — but the first simulation hit like a reality check I hadn’t asked for. Soul-crushing is not an exaggeration.I won’t lie to you. I’m trying every trick available to stay the course. I’ve walked when I should have run. I’ve quietly modified exercises when no one was watching. And in a particularly optimistic moment, I added pre-workout — 185mg of stimulant — to manufacture energy for those Saturday mornings.The logic seemed sound. More energy, more output, better training.What I discovered is that pre-workout and sustained cardio have a complicated relationship. The stimulant effect that feels like rocket fuel in the first ten minutes becomes something else entirely by kilometre four. Your heart is doing things your legs cannot match. You feel simultaneously wired and completely depleted.I just want to stay in it — that’s the honest truth. But the pre-workout will stop. The body doesn’t lie. Each simulation follows the same arc: arrive with a mixture of giddy excitement and cautious optimism, feel reasonable for the first twenty minutes, then enter a sustained negotiation with myself about what I’m actually capable of. Get back home completely knackered — that’s the only word for it — into an ice bath, the whole day gone to recovery.But here is the thing I did not expect: the satisfaction that stays.It comes later, quietly, when you’re sitting in the afternoon, and you realise you did something hard this morning. Not hard in the way that difficult emails are hard, or difficult conversations, or running Kimo — the grind of it, the things that drain you without leaving you anything. Hard in the old way. Physical, honest, undeniable. Your body did something, and it remembers.And doing it with people I love has been the part I didn’t plan for. There’s something that happens when you suffer alongside people you care about. Nobody performs. Nobody pretends. The usual social surface falls away, and what’s left is just people, breathing hard, keeping each other going.A few days ago, I looked over at Nader. He was on the treadmill next to where I was rowing. His pace read 13.5 kilometres per hour. My runs are usually half that. He wasn’t even training seriously. He was barely out of breath.Youth. That’s all I will say about that. There’s something I keep coming back to, harder to admit than anything about the training.I have a friend who is now semi-retired, riding motorcycles across countries, living by his own compass. I think about him on those Saturday mornings. Not with envy. With recognition. We’re all near the same age, most of us in this group. We’ve all built things, spent decades doing the work.And somewhere in the decision to sign up for HYROX — to choose something hard and physical and communal — I think we’re all answering the same unspoken question.Not can we still do this. But what does it mean that we want to?I don’t have the answer yet. But I’m showing up on Saturday mornings, which is maybe the beginning of one. Twenty-one days to Barcelona. The running is still my biggest problem. I’m building — slowly, which is not the word I’d choose, but it’s the honest one.I signed up on a whim in mid-December.I’m still here in April. Still showing up.Still getting into ice baths.Still pulling myself back up from that bent-over position on the side of the road.That, for now, is enough.— More to come before May 14th. HYROXRunningExercise Mo Issa Previous Previous The HYROX Diaries #2:What Are You Willing to Suffer For? Next Next A Tale of Two Cats --- ### A Tale of Two Cats Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/two-cats Description: Sassy. Scottish Fold, indoor cat, queen of everything she surveys. She has spotted Pirate through the glass and is doing that thing cats do — back arched, nose wrinkled, a slow hiss that says you do not belong here. On the other side: Pirate. One eye, scarred leg, perpetual hunger. She is not hissing back. She is just looking at Sassy — quietly, almost hopefully — as if some small gesture of approval from this pampered stranger might mean something. A Tale of Two Cats 31 Mar Written By Mo Issa There is a glass door in my house that tells you everything you need to know about the world.On one side: Sassy. Scottish Fold, indoor cat, queen of everything she surveys. She has spotted Pirate through the glass and is doing that thing cats do — back arched, nose wrinkled, a slow hiss that says you do not belong here. On the other side: Pirate. One eye, scarred leg, perpetual hunger. She is not hissing back. She is just looking at Sassy — quietly, almost hopefully — as if some small gesture of approval from this pampered stranger might mean something.It never comes. Sassy turns and walks away. Pirate waits a moment longer, then goes back to surviving.I’ve thought about that glass door a lot.Sassy eats well, sleeps well, and moves through the house like she owns it — because as far as she’s concerned, she does. She has her spot on the sofa, her favourite corner, her routines that we’ve unconsciously built our days around. If something displeases her, she makes just enough of a scene to let you know she noticed, and that you should feel bad about it.She has given us, as a family, some of our most joyful and ridiculous moments — the kind you don’t plan and can’t manufacture. My kids have accused me of overfeeding her, treating her like royalty. “She’s just a cat,” I’d tell them. She’s not going for an MBA. She’s not running a company or becoming a doctor. Let her be.Then there’s Pirate. She was a street cat — we started feeding her one day and she simply never left, stationing herself outside the door like it was always her post. We named her Pirate because when she was young, she lost an eye in a fight. She didn’t stop there. She’s nearly died three times since. Once she got tangled in a metal security fence and nearly lost her leg. She survived that too.She’s a hustler — follows you around doing this performance, meowing and crouching and blinking slowly, that she clearly thinks is charming but honestly isn’t convincing anyone. She’s not elegant. She doesn’t own any room she walks into.But Pirate is alive in a way that Sassy simply isn’t.I think the way the world is going, most of us are living as Sassy.Not by choice, exactly. More by design. We’ve built a world extraordinarily good at removing friction and absorbing pain.Headache? Tablet. Anxiety? Prescription. Boredom? Scroll. We’ve optimised so relentlessly for comfort that we’ve sedated ourselves — not into happiness, just into a kind of flatness. A life that is safe, managed, and increasingly hollow.That’s Sassy’s life exactly. Everything provided. Nothing required. No meal to be earned, no fight to be made, no morning where survival is genuinely in question. She will never know what it feels like to want something so badly that you’d embarrass yourself, or even get killed for trying to get it.I know this feeling from the inside. I write — not because I have to, it doesn’t pay my bills — on my own terms, as and when I want. And lately that freedom has become its own quiet trap. A few hours a week. Enough to feel like I’m doing it.Not enough to actually go anywhere. I know I should be showing up more, engaging, and building a readership. I know this. And yet there’s no real hunger behind the knowing. No Pirate-like desperation pushing me toward the glass. I’m comfortable.And comfort, it turns out, is a very effective anaesthetic. You don’t feel it working. That’s the whole point.I wrote about this in a different context recently — about how most of us aren’t depressed, we’re just under-alive. We confuse pleasure with vitality, productivity with purpose, and comfort with contentment. None of them are the same thing.Aliveness is something else entirely. It arrives in flashes: after effort, in honest connection, in the quiet pride of becoming slightly more than we were yesterday. It’s not something you can optimise into. You can’t schedule it. You have to earn it — or at least, you have to show up in a way that makes it possible.What strikes me about Pirate isn’t the suffering — it’s the engagement. She is fully in it. Every meal she begs for matters. Every fence, every fight, every morning she makes it through — it counts. She’s not waiting for conditions to improve or for life to feel a little safer before she starts living it. She’s living it now, with one eye, a dodgy leg, and absolutely zero dignity.There’s a version of the good life we’ve been sold that looks a lot like Sassy’s. Security. Routine. Comfort. Everything taken care of. And I understand the appeal — I’ve chased it too. But somewhere along the way, I started noticing that the more I optimised for safety, the less I felt. Not less pain. Less everything. Less hunger. Less urgency. Less of that electric sense of being here.Zorba, Kazantzakis’s great, unwashed, impossible character, said it plainly: “Life is trouble. Only death is not.” He wasn’t celebrating suffering. He was saying a life scrubbed clean of all trouble isn’t really a life. It’s a waiting room.We’ve built very beautiful waiting rooms.I watch Sassy sometimes, stretched out in the afternoon sun, perfectly still, perfectly comfortable, and I think: she doesn’t know any different. That’s the thing about being sedated. You don’t feel the sedation. Everything feels fine because you’ve lost the ability to sense what fine actually costs you.Pirate doesn’t have that problem. She knows exactly what she wants. She knows exactly what it costs. And she goes after it anyway — badly, desperately, without grace — every single day. She could die tomorrow. She nearly has, several times. But she is not waiting for the right moment, or the right conditions, or for life to become a little kinder before she engages with it.She’s in it. Now. Fully.Most of us feel it — that low hum, in the quiet moments. The sense that something is missing, but the comfort is too comfortable to go looking for what it is. We’ve confused the absence of suffering with the presence of aliveness. They are not the same thing.Maybe the question worth asking isn’t how to make life safer.Maybe it’s how to make it more like Pirate’s.One eye. Still fighting. Still here. A Tale of Two CatsScottish FoldPirateAnxietyHeadache Mo Issa Previous Previous The HYROX Diaries #1:The Body Doesn't Lie Next Next The Haircut --- ### The Haircut Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/haircut Description: But the crazy part is that this wasn’t just a thirteen-year-old thing. It carried through into my adulthood — and when it did, it mutated. The silence didn’t stay silence. What started as a boy who couldn’t speak up became a man who sometimes goes too far the other way. Either I walk away entirely, or I push until I get what I want. The Haircut 26 Mar Written By Mo Issa I was thirteen years old. I sat in the barber’s chair, and within sixty seconds I knew — he was going too short. Nothing like what I’d asked for. And I said nothing.I sat there for twenty minutes and watched it happen. I left looking like someone I didn’t recognise. And I carried that haircut for six weeks.What was I so afraid of? Making it awkward. The barber’s reaction. The small social friction of saying — actually, can you stop? That’s not what I wanted. Six words. And I couldn’t say them.We had just moved to the UK. I was alone in a new country, away from everything familiar. Maybe that’s part of it.But the crazy part is that this wasn’t just a thirteen-year-old thing. It carried through into my adulthood — and when it did, it mutated. The silence didn’t stay silence. What started as a boy who couldn’t speak up became a man who sometimes goes too far the other way. Either I walk away entirely, or I push until I get what I want.The avoidance flipped into aggression. Same fear underneath. Different costume.The quiet, daily version is still there, though. Not the dramatic kind — not the big blowups or the obvious standoffs. The kind that looks totally reasonable on the surface and is slowly, steadily costing you your life. A few days ago, I came across this idea from writer Avaat Bookbear Express:As a rule, the psychologically healthier someone is, the less time it takes them to do something they were eventually going to do anyway. Anything from sending a text to quitting a job.Which means all the delay — all the circling, the procrastinating, the “I’ll deal with it later” — isn’t a strategy. It’s fear. Dressed up as a strategy.And the fear, almost always, is the same thing: friction. Conflict. The moment when you might make someone uncomfortable, or be made uncomfortable yourself. Just before COVID, I hired a close friend to lead a major marketing restructure at the company. He couldn’t deliver. I knew it for months before I said anything — circling, hoping, avoiding the conversation I needed to have. And when I finally did confront it, I’d waited so long that the frustration came out harder than it should have.We hardly speak now. The irony is that the avoidance didn’t protect the friendship. It just meant that when the collision came, there was too much unsaid weight behind it.My memoir took a long time to write.Seven years. And I’ve had stretches—sometimes months—when I didn’t open the file. Where I told myself it was too hard to reveal so much, or the time wasn’t right, or I needed to live more of it before I could write it.All of which contained some truth. But underneath all of it, if I’m honest, was this: I was afraid of sitting down and discovering I couldn’t solve the problems I knew were there. That the structure was broken. That I didn’t have what it takes to fix it.The avoidance was protecting me from that confrontation. With the work. With myself.And of course — the only way through was through. The only way to find out if I could fix it was to sit down and try. Every day I didn’t was another day I was circling the rock, pretending not to see it. There’s a version of this at work, too.There are conversations I’ve needed to have — with people on my team, with family, sometimes with myself — that I’ve delayed. Weeks sometimes. Because I knew they’d be uncomfortable. Because I didn’t know exactly how they’d land. Because it was easier to keep moving and hope the situation would resolve itself.It never resolves itself.What actually happens is that the thing grows. The unsaid thing gets heavier. The relationship quietly strains under the weight of what’s not being said. And eventually, you’re not just having a hard conversation — you’re having a hard conversation plus cleaning up everything that accumulated while you were avoiding it.The postponement always costs more than the confrontation. Here’s what I’ve come to believe: avoidance isn’t really about the other person. It looks like consideration — I don’t want to make things awkward, I don’t want to upset them — but it’s not. It’s self-protection. You are protecting yourself from the discomfort of their reaction. Which means what looks like kindness is actually cowardice dressed in polite clothing.Real consideration sometimes means saying the uncomfortable thing. To the barber. To the person on your team who isn’t performing. To the family member you’ve been tiptoeing around for years. To yourself, about the book you keep not writing. Ava uses another image that I keep coming back to. The idea that most of us have ten, twelve giant rocks in our backyard — things we are terrified to move, because we’d have to see what’s underneath. So instead, we just chart a path around them. We organise our whole life around not disturbing them.And slowly, the backyard gets smaller.The space we have to move in — creatively, relationally, professionally — shrinks to whatever’s left after we’ve routed around all the things we refuse to face. I’m not writing this from a place of having figured it out. I still go quiet sometimes when I should speak. I still open a new tab when I should open the manuscript. I still find reasons to postpone the call I know I need to make.But I’m getting faster. And I think that’s the only metric that matters. Not whether you avoid — everyone avoids. But how long it takes you to turn back around and face it.The healthier I get, the shorter the delay.The thirteen-year-old in the barber’s chair — I don’t blame him. He was doing the only thing he knew how to do.But I’m not thirteen anymore. And there are too many things I’ve stayed silent about for too long.What are the rocks in your backyard you’re routing around? The HaircutHaircutAvaMemoir Mo Issa Previous Previous A Tale of Two Cats Next Next Be Here Now --- ### Be Here Now Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/be-here-now Description: Joseph Nguyen, in his book Don’t Believe Everything You Think, draws this line clearly. Thinking, he argues, is the source of our suffering — not the thoughts themselves, but what we do with them. The spiral. The second-guessing. The relentless inner commentary that turns a moment of clarity into a week of anxiety. He echoes a truth that philosophers and mystics have long understood: we cannot solve our problems with the same level of consciousness that created them. Tactics are temporary. An expansion of consciousness is permanent. Be Here Now 19 Mar Written By Mo Issa For the past few weeks, the first thing I reached for was my phone. The war in Lebanon — a country tied to my blood, my family, my history — had been pulling me into a loop I couldn’t escape. Twitter. Instagram. Refresh. Scroll. More images, more headlines, more anger, more grief. By the time I’d been awake twenty minutes, I was already exhausted. Already somewhere else — somewhere distant and dark and completely outside my control.My morning practice — meditation, journaling, reading — had quietly disappeared. I hadn’t decided to stop. I just kept choosing the scroll instead.Then, a few days ago, I tried to stop.Not because I stopped caring. But because I realised something: I wasn’t consuming the news anymore. The news was consuming me.So I deleted the apps. Closed the feed. And in that sudden silence, I came back to myself.I started meditating again. Journaling. Reading literature instead of headlines. And something started to shift — a stillness I had forgotten was available to me.That’s when I looked down at my left arm. I’ve had a tattoo there for almost ten years. Three words: Be Here Now. It’s been there all this time as a guide for me, and yet I keep ignoring the words.I can’t remember why I chose these particular words. Perhaps it was Ram Dass, or even other Eastern philosophical books I was reading at the time. Probably, as always, it was my subconscious leading the way.That silence cracked something open. It showed me a distinction I hadn’t fully seen before: there is a profound difference between a thought and thinking.A thought arrives on its own. It shows up unbidden — a flash, an instinct, a quiet knowing. It doesn’t announce itself. It just lands. These are the moments of real clarity: the idea that comes in the shower, the answer that surfaces mid-run, the sudden understanding that arrives when you’ve stopped looking for it. Thoughts like these have a lightness to them. They come from somewhere beneath the noise.Thinking is what we do to those thoughts. We grab them. We interrogate them. We loop them, dissect them, stress-test them against every possible scenario. We use the prefrontal cortex — that overachieving, overworked part of the brain — to pull the thought apart until it no longer resembles what it was when it first arrived. We analyse it into a corner. We think ourselves into paralysis. And we call this being responsible. Strategic. Thorough.Joseph Nguyen, in his book Don’t Believe Everything You Think, draws this line clearly. Thinking, he argues, is the source of our suffering — not the thoughts themselves, but what we do with them. The spiral. The second-guessing. The relentless inner commentary that turns a moment of clarity into a week of anxiety. He echoes a truth that philosophers and mystics have long understood: we cannot solve our problems with the same level of consciousness that created them. Tactics are temporary. An expansion of consciousness is permanent.We are trying to think our way out of suffering that thinking created in the first place. That’s the trap. And most of us live inside it without ever noticing the walls.I had been doing this with Lebanon. Taking a thought — I’m worried about the people I love — and turning it into hours of scrolling, catastrophizing, helpless rage. The thought was real and human and necessary. The thinking was destroying me.This brings me to something Nguyen calls the inside-out understanding — the part of his work I keep returning to. The idea is simple, but it cuts deep: our experience of life is generated from the inside out, not the other way around.Most of us live outside-in.We believe our inner state is determined by what’s happening around us. The news is bad, so we feel bad. The business is struggling, so we feel anxious. The world is on fire, so we scroll at 6 a.m., looking for something to confirm what we already fear. We hand the keys to our inner life to everything outside of us — to circumstances, to other people, to algorithms designed to keep us agitated.But the truth — and this is what the silence always reveals to me — is that it works the other way. The world doesn’t make us feel things. Our thinking about the world does. And if our thinking is the variable, then we have far more power over our experience than we’ve been told.This isn’t toxic positivity. It’s not about pretending the war isn’t happening or that pain isn’t real. Pain is real. But suffering — the prolonged, compounding, self-inflicted kind — that is optional.When I stopped scrolling and started sitting — really sitting, in the quiet, with my breath and my journal and a novel — I wasn’t escaping reality. I was returning to it. To my actual reality. The one that exists inside me, beneath the noise, beneath the headlines, beneath the thinking.The practice I’m building now, morning by morning, is learning to receive a thought without immediately reacting to it. To let it land. To stay with it before I start pulling it apart.Meditation is teaching me this. Not because it empties the mind — it doesn’t. If anything, sitting still reveals just how loud the mind actually is. But it creates a gap. A small, crucial space between the thought arriving and the thinking beginning. In that gap is something that feels like peace. Or at minimum, like presence.I’m not there yet. I know this journey inwards, into silence and inner peace, will be a lifetime quest.The overthinking mind is persistent. It wants to plan, to worry, to replay. But I’m starting to catch the moment — that precise transition from receiving a thought to reacting to it — and sometimes, I can pause there. Stay in it a little longer. Let the thought be what it is before I make it into something else.The outside world will always have wars, headlines, and reasons to panic. It will always offer you a reason to leave yourself. The question is whether you take it.Be here now. Not as a tattoo. As a practice. LebanonJoseph NguyenBe Here Now Mo Issa Previous Previous The Haircut Next Next The Consumption of the Soul --- ### The Consumption of the Soul Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/consumption-of-the-soul Description: The philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls the world we’ve built the Achievement Society — a civilisation that replaced external discipline with internal compulsion. Nobody forces you to hustle. You do it to yourself, freely, because you’ve been shaped to believe that relentless production and consumption are the same thing as being alive. We are no longer obedience-subjects, Han writes, but achievement-subjects — entrepreneurs of ourselves, forever optimising, performing, acquiring. The Consumption of the Soul 12 Mar Written By Mo Issa “We buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like.” — Chuck Palahniuk ILast week I bought a new padel racket I didn’t need.My old one was fine. But this one was newer, sexier, and more expensive. I walked out of the club flashing my new Adidas Metalbone, with all the boys looking on with admiration.I had to have it. Not for the game. For what it signalled. For the feeling of being part of the group.I’m not proud of that. But I’m also not surprised.It doesn’t stop at rackets. I’m sitting here questioning whether I needed the expensive car I bought last year — the one that gives respect — when that money could have been saved. The honest answer is no. I wanted the feeling it promised.It didn’t last.It never does.II.What has capitalism done to my soul?Not to the economy, the environment, or society in the abstract, but to my soul.I can diagnose the system all I want, but the harder confession is this: I am not outside the machine. I am inside it. And the machine is inside me.The philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls the world we’ve built the Achievement Society — a civilisation that replaced external discipline with internal compulsion. Nobody forces you to hustle.You do it to yourself, freely, because you’ve been shaped to believe that relentless production and consumption are the same thing as being alive. We are no longer obedience-subjects, Han writes, but achievement-subjects — entrepreneurs of ourselves, forever optimising, performing, acquiring.The whip is internal now. And it is merciless.I feel this as a daily experience, not an abstraction. The restlessness when I’m not doing something. The vague guilt of stillness. The way motion — any motion, even buying a racket I don’t need — briefly quiets the noise.Han calls it the compulsion of production: a nervous hunger that hurries us from one thing to the next, never arriving, never completing. Because completion would mean stopping. And stopping feels dangerously close to dying.I meditate in the mornings. I read the mystics. I write about presence. The Bhagavad Gita tells me to detach from the fruits of my actions. Iris Murdoch tells me to lose the self in something greater. Epictetus tells me to distinguish what is mine from what is not.And still, the reflex persists — a groove worn so deep that even when you know it’s there, your feet find it anyway.III.In the 1970s, psychologist Bruce Alexander built Rat Park — a large, enriched environment with ample space, social contact, and freedom. He gave rats a choice between normal water and heroin-laced water. The rats in Rat Park barely touched the drugs. However, the isolated rats, not in the Rat Park, but in small cages, drank until they died.Same rats. Same drug. Different environment.Addiction isn’t about the substance.It’s about the cage.I think about this often. Not because I consider myself an addict, but because I recognise the cage — cities designed to funnel you from home to work and back, consumption the only available comfort in between. No nature. No third places. No infrastructure that doesn’t require you to spend money to belong somewhere.The environment creates the need. The corporations provide the solution. Then they tell you it’s your fault for needing it.IV.The erosion isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t announce itself.It creeps.It’s the gradual replacement — first your time, then your attention, then your identity — until you’re reaching for your phone not because you want anything specific, but because you don’t know what else to do with a quiet moment.Stillness has become suspicious. The brand promise was never about the product. It’s about the feeling: you’re not enough, but you could be. Your brain learns this. Dopamine fires. The pathway deepens. The pattern repeats.Starbucks becomes your third place. Amazon becomes your intimacy. Tinder gamifies your loneliness and sells it back to you as choice. None of it fills the actual hole — the one carved by isolation, by hostile cities, by a system that profits from your chronic low-level misery.V.I’m 57. I’ve read Gibran, Hesse, and Bukowski. I’ve sat with the Stoics, had sessions with therapists, and found real grace on mountain trails.And I still feel the pull.Here’s what makes it worse: the people around me don’t see any of this. The friends, the colleagues, the social circles — they play the game cheerfully, unconsciously, without question. New cars, new rackets, new watches. Status performed and returned like a handshake.Being around them is like osmosis. The current pulls, the water flows toward least resistance, and without deciding to, I find myself drawn back — spending, signalling, consuming — as if my private convictions dissolve the moment I enter a room full of people who have never once asked whether any of this is making them whole.That gap — between who I am in solitude and how I behave in company — is perhaps the most corrosive thing of all.VI.Murdoch wrote about the “fat, relentless ego” — the part of the mind that never stops narrating, comparing, grasping. She believed beauty could silence it. A kestrel hovering outside the window. A view from a mountain peak. A moment where the world becomes larger than your problems.I’ve had those moments — on early mornings before the city wakes, on hillsides with nothing but wind and birdsong. They’re the opposite of consumption: they give without taking, fill without emptying.But they require something the modern world is engineered to deny you — time that belongs to no one. Space that isn’t monetised. Attention that isn’t harvested.The system doesn’t want you to have a kestrel moment. It wants you to convert that stillness into a purchase, a post, a subscription.VII.I don't have a solution.What I have is this: the moment you see the cage clearly, something in you refuses to settle for it entirely. That refusal, however small, is where you begin.Simone Weil wrote that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity — she meant it toward others, but I’ve come to believe it applies equally to the self. To notice why you’re reaching — really reaching — is a radical act in a world engineered to keep you reaching without ever asking why.The grey concrete isn’t accidental. The absence of parks, public squares, places you can simply be without spending — that’s not neglect. Its design.VIII.The rain is falling as I write this.I’m thinking about the person who goes to Starbucks every morning. Same time, same drink, same routine — not because they love the coffee, but because the system has given them nothing else that reliable, that consistent, that available. I don’t judge them. I am them, some days.But I’m trying, however imperfectly, to build my own Rat park. A life rich enough that the brands lose their grip. You can’t escape the system entirely — not without going full Chris McCandless, the young man who gave away his savings, burned his cash, and walked alone into the Alaskan wilderness to live off the land. He died there at 24. A cautionary tale, or a martyrdom, depending on how you read it. Either way, not a blueprint.What’s left is resistance. Quiet, daily, embodied resistance. A vote for presence over consumption. For depth over stimulation. For the self that existed before the algorithm learned its shape.That self is still here.I can feel it on mornings like this one.And that, for now, is enough. The Consumption of the SoulSoulPadelChris McCandless Mo Issa Previous Previous Be Here Now Next Next The Cat and the Mountain --- ### The Cat and the Mountain Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/catandmountain Description: The deepest growth left might not be another metric. It might be learning how to expand without self-punishment. To pursue progress without panic. To work without worshipping work. To breathe — taped or untaped — without believing that my value depends on the results. The Cat and the Mountain 27 Feb Written By Mo Issa “Here we go again,” she said.“What do you mean?”“You and your mouth tape and your breath science. Aren’t you tired of following rules so you can optimise everything?”“What are we here for then?” I said. “Aren’t we here to grow and become better versions of ourselves?”“Yes,” she said. “But you do it too much. It’s relentless.”I didn’t have an answer. I went to bed with tape over my mouth and lay there in the dark, breathing through my nose, wondering if she was right.I’ve been listening to James Nestor on breath, tracking my running splits, monitoring my sleep, and reading about healthspan and oxygen efficiency.I cracked 5K last week. My snoring is less. The systems work. So what is the problem?The problem, I’ve come to suspect, isn’t the tape.It’s the compulsion underneath it.Frankl’s Inverse Law 1 states that when people cannot easily access joy, they overinvest in meaning, productivity, and self-improvement as a form of compensation.The drive isn’t virtue. It’s avoidance. Meaning becomes a coping mechanism. If you struggle to feel ease, you chase achievement. If you can’t relax, you optimise. If you sense an existential void beneath the surface of your days, you fill it with output and forward motion.When I first heard this, I dismissed it. Then it settled. Then it landed like something true I didn’t want to admit.Fear has always been my primary fuel. Even when the business is doing well, I’m afraid it will collapse. Even when I write something good, it isn’t good enough. Even when I win at Padel, I feel as if I’m lucky. I live like an imposter, always one quiet Tuesday away from being found out.A rat is more motivated by the cat behind it than the food in front. I have spent years running from that cat — and calling it ambition.The trap is elegant in its cruelty. Because the running works. The metrics improve. The body gets stronger. The business grows. The output accumulates. And you look, by every visible measure, like a man who has his life together.And so the behaviour is continually rewarded, the avoidance is never named, and the void — the original thing you were fleeing — remains perfectly intact beneath all that forward motion.Life becomes one long marshmallow test.Gratification later.Rest later.Joy later.Once the next milestone is hit, once the numbers look right, once I’m finally enough — then I can relax.Work becomes the default setting. Leisure feels suspicious. Stillness feels like laziness. And somewhere in the accumulation, you forget what you were trying to feel.If not meaning, or achievement or hedonism, then what are we here for?I keep returning to this word: aliveness.Most of us aren’t depressed — we’re under-alive. We confuse pleasure with vitality and productivity with purpose, yet neither guarantees that electric sense of being here.Aliveness arrives in flashes: after effort, in awe, in creation, in honest connection, in the quiet pride of becoming slightly more than we were yesterday.The real danger isn’t failure; it’s drifting into a life where nothing stirs the soul.Aliveness is not happiness. Happiness is often passive — something that arrives in the absence of difficulty. Aliveness is something else. It’s the quality of being fully present inside an experience, with your whole self engaged.It’s what I feel in the middle of a brutal rally on the padel court, not narrating myself from above but simply inside the game. It’s what I felt on a mountain in Peru, watching the sky burn orange above clouds I’d never seen from below. It’s what I feel at the end of a piece of writing that cost me something — not just the satisfaction of completion, but the sense that something real passed through me.Happiness alone feels shallow. Suffering alone feels masochistic. Growth alone feels like what I’ve been doing. And it’s exhausting.What I’m slowly understanding is that progress is not the enemy. Discipline is not the enemy. Curiosity, ambition, the desire to improve — none of these are the problem.The problem is what they’re in service of. When every arena becomes a courtroom — the business, the sport, the writing, the fatherhood — and you are simultaneously the prosecutor and the accused, growth becomes a trial you can never win. Your worth is always pending the next verdict.“I am enough” doesn’t mean stop growing. It means your value is not on trial while you grow.That’s the shift I’m trying to make. I won’t pretend I’ve made it.At 57, I don’t think I need the cat behind me anymore.I need the mountain in front.Not to prove anything. Not to compensate for some hollow place I haven’t dealt with. Not to optimise myself into a better version that finally deserves to exist.But to experience.To build and create because creation is one of the most alive things a human being can do.To feel awe — not because I scheduled it, but because I showed up fully awake.The deepest growth left might not be another metric. It might be learning how to expand without self-punishment. To pursue progress without panic. To work without worshipping work. To breathe — taped or untaped — without believing that my value depends on the results.Most nights, I still go to bed with tape over my mouth. She doesn’t say anything anymore. Maybe she’s waiting to see if I’ve understood something. I’m not sure I have — not fully. But I think the question has changed. And maybe that’s where it starts.We are not here to endlessly delay joy in the name of meaning.We are not here to anaesthetise ourselves with pleasure either.We are not here merely to grow.We are here to be alive.And perhaps the real discipline — the hardest discipline, the one no app measures — is learning to stop putting your worth on trial while you do it. catmountainFrankl’s Inverse Lawfearambitionalive Mo Issa Previous Previous The Consumption of the Soul Next Next Am I Living A Small Life? --- ### Am I Living A Small Life? Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/small-life Description: A few weeks ago, I binged several episodes of Billions. Both rivals—Axelrod and Chuck Rhoades—live such full lives they barely sleep. They’re on the go 24/7, making moves, closing deals, destroying enemies. At the end of one episode, my heart was beating so fast I couldn’t sleep. Am I Living A Small Life? 19 Feb Written By Mo Issa Yesterday, I skimmed through three months of journal entries. Something uncomfortable emerged: I keep circling the same themes. Over and over.My children’s lack of urgency frustrates me in a world that’s becoming faster and stranger. I’m disillusioned by how angry and divided the world has become. My company’s performance isn’t where I want it. Padel consumes too much of my life. I’m excited about my Hyrox race in May.And I really look forward to going to bed early.Every day feels the same. Same thoughts, same frustrations, same loop.The question that haunts me: Am I living a small life?The Lives I’m Not LivingA few weeks ago, I binged several episodes of Billions. Both rivals—Axelrod and Chuck Rhoades—live such full lives they barely sleep. They’re on the go 24/7, making moves, closing deals, destroying enemies. At the end of one episode, my heart was beating so fast I couldn’t sleep.A few months ago, I read Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. The fiesta scene in Pamplona remains ingrained in my mind: “The fiesta was really started. It kept up day and night for seven days. The dancing kept up, the drinking kept up, the noise went on... Everything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences.”These are the lives that I sometimes measure mine against.And yesterday sharpened my thoughts. I didn’t have much to do at work. No padel game. I was on my own with my day—and it felt empty.Perhaps what’s missing is depth, walking in nature, transcendence, and a mission-driven life. All the things I talk about but don’t practice.So my real struggle became: how do I expand the life I’m living?But here’s what I’ve come to understand: that’s the wrong question.The Life I’m ResistingI have a tagline: “Awaken to Aliveness.” I wrote a book called The Midlife Shift. I speak at conferences. I’ve rebuilt my business after a very tough period. I’m surrounded by people who love me.And yet I find myself dreaming of Hemingway’s fiesta and Chuck Rhoades’s singular purpose.The word that keeps appearing is “small.” I’m living a small life.The judgment in that word is crushing. This life isn’t enough. I’m not enough.But what if I’ve been measuring the wrong thing?The Telic TrapI kept asking how to expand my life until I encountered the philosopher Kieran Setiya.Setiya identifies what he calls telic activities—actions that are goal-directed, aimed at completion. Writing a book. Running a race. Building a business. Winning a case. I’ve spent forty years on projects with finish lines.Here’s what Setiya realized: telic activities are “autosubversive.” You achieve the goal—the meaning is extinguished. You fail—you’re left with frustration. Either way, “fulfilment lies always in the future or the past”—never here.This is why material gains mean nothing. Why the TEDx stage felt hollow. Why I feel so low after finishing a manuscript.Axelrod and Chuck Rhoades are living intensely telic lives. All that 24/7 intensity? It’s just telic activity on steroids. Take down this rival, close this deal—then what? The next one. The fever pitch of Hemingway’s fiesta? Also telic. It builds to a peak, then collapses.External intensity isn’t the opposite of a small life. It’s just a different flavor of the same trap.My journal loop proves it. I treat everything as a problem to solve. If only my children would do things my way. If only my company’s numbers improve. Then I’ll feel purposeful.But even if I solved every problem tomorrow, there would be new ones.The loop isn’t created by the problems. It’s created by how I relate to them.The False SolutionWhen I ask, “How do I expand my life?”—I mean: add more.More depth. More nature walks. More transcendence. Stack meaningful activities on top of what I’m already doing.But this is still telic thinking in disguise. “Achieve depth.” “Find transcendence.” Just more goals. More ways to fail.In my journal, I wrote: “Something has to give. Either something changes—or I accept that this is it.”What if acceptance is the change?The Atelic TurnSetiya offers an alternative: atelic activities—activities with no terminal point, no completion. Going for a walk. Not walking to somewhere—just walking. Spending time with friends. Thinking. Parenting.These activities can’t be completed. That’s the point.Setiya’s key insight: “An atelic end is realized in the present as much as it can ever be realized.”You live it now, or you don’t live it at all.I don’t need to change what I’m doing. I need to change how I see it.My children’s resistance to my urgency—that’s not a problem to solve. It’s a relationship to inhabit.The company’s performance—not a target to hit once and for all, but an ongoing practice of leading and showing up.Even the “small life” itself—not a problem to fix, but a life to live.What if the loop isn’t the problem? What if my desire to escape it is?Maybe You Can Keep CirclingSetiya’s philosophy suggests: maybe you can keep circling—if you stop treating the circles as failures.The themes repeat because they’re my themes. Children. Company. Meaning. These aren’t obstacles to my real life. They are my life.And here’s what I’m learning: Axelrod’s life isn’t fuller than mine. It’s just louder. Hemingway’s fiesta isn’t more alive than my Tuesday. It’s just more frantic.A small life—measured by external metrics—might actually be a rich life, measured by presence.I Am EnoughThis is the hardest acceptance: I am enough—here, in the loop, in the smallness.This version of me. The one who looks forward to padel and bedtime. Who circles the same frustrations. Who talks about transcendence but doesn’t always practice it.This person is enough.Not complacency. Not giving up. But engaging differently. Not as projects to complete—as practices to inhabit.Padel isn’t an escape from my real life. It’s where I’m most present.When I read, I don’t need to hit 50 books. I just need to be reading—engaging with ideas, letting them change me.At work, I don’t need to wait for meaningful tasks. I can be present in the mundane ones.My journal circles the same themes. Setiya would say: “That’s not a bug; it’s a feature.”These recurring concerns aren’t problems waiting for solutions. They’re the ongoing substance of my life.The Small Life, Lived LargeHow do I live a larger life?I already am.Not by doing more, but by being here.The smallness I feel isn’t about the size of my life. It’s about living at a distance from it—always ahead, planning the next goal; always behind, regretting the last failure. Never quite here.Aliveness isn’t a destination. It’s what happens when you stop treating your life as a project to improve.This is the life. The one with generational friction, company struggles, and too much padel. The one where I look forward to going to bed early.And it’s enough.Not because I’ve achieved anything new. But because I’ve stopped measuring it against Billions and Hemingway and everyone else’s external intensity.I am enough. Not as an achievement. But as the simple, terrifying, liberating truth.Here. Now. In the loop.“Something has to give,” I wrote.And something did: the belief that external fullness matters more than internal presence. Am I Living A Small Lifelivingsmallsmall lifeHyroxAxelrodChuck RhoadesHemingwayAxelrod and Chuck RhoadesThe Midlife ShiftKieran SetiyaThe Telic TrapThe Atelic Turn Mo Issa Previous Previous The Cat and the Mountain Next Next The One Thing We Actually Control --- ### The One Thing We Actually Control Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/control Description: I’ve been reading Epictetus, the 2nd-century Stoic philosopher. His words have unsettled me: we control almost nothing. He says, “Some things are up to us, and some are not. Up to us are judgment, inclination, desire, aversion—in short, whatever is our own doing. Not up to us are our bodies, possessions, reputations, public offices—in short, whatever is not our own doing.” The One Thing We Actually Control 12 Feb Written By Mo Issa It was 4:30 a.m., and I couldn’t sleep. I lay tossing and turning while numbers flashed through my mind. My 7-minute-per-kilometre pace was too slow for my upcoming HYROX event. The 15% contribution from the outdoor team won’t cover their costs at my company. And it’s mid-February—I’ve posted two essays instead of the scheduled six.Then my thoughts went deeper. Am I making progress toward the things I want in my life? Will I be able to hike at 90? Will I lose my writing habit, and with it, my bridge to my inner, true self? And lately, why do I feel like I’m not enough?I couldn’t sleep, so I got up, made coffee, and stared out the window. It was pitch black. My racing thoughts came to an abrupt end with Sassy’s meow.Here’s what was troubling me: my life runs on numbers, and when I don’t reach them, I feel like a failure.In truth, I’m a control freak who spends immense energy trying to control outcomes I can’t control. I want to be strong, fit, and healthy. I want to be financially independent. I want to remain curious and develop my thinking through writing, reading, and engaging with fellow thinkers.I’ve built systems and logged countless hours toward these goals.And yet, despite all this effort, I wake up at 4:30 a.m. feeling like I’m failing at all of it.The Philosopher Who Won’t Let Me RestI’ve been reading Epictetus, the 2nd-century Stoic philosopher. His words have unsettled me: we control almost nothing. He says, “Some things are up to us, and some are not. Up to us are judgment, inclination, desire, aversion—in short, whatever is our own doing. Not up to us are our bodies, possessions, reputations, public offices—in short, whatever is not our own doing.”Epictetus is saying that one thing is up to us: our deliberate, conscious judgments.The problem is, I don’t want to accept this.The Illusion I Can’t Let Go OfI think about this in light of my health obsession. I’m thinking healthspan, not lifespan. I want to maximise the quality of my final years. I track my steps. I count macros. I optimise my sleep. Underneath all of it is this belief that if I do everything right, I can guarantee that I’ll be hiking some remote mountain when I’m 95.But I can’t.I can eat perfectly and get sick. My body will age no matter how many supplements I take. Somewhere deep down, I know this. Which is maybe why I’m so anxious about it all.Epictetus says I’m trying to control the wrong thing. All my careful habits are decisions I’m making, judgments about what’s valuable. But they’re not guarantees. They never were.What I control is something both smaller and more slippery: how I choose to think about these possibilities. Whether I let the fear of illness prevent me from living. Whether I let the inevitability of ageing poison my present.The trouble is, when the anxiety hits at 4:30 a.m., it doesn’t feel like I’m choosing my thoughts. It feels like they’re choosing me.The Exhaustion of It AllI’m tired of carrying the weight of wanting what I want so much. I’m tired of trying to guarantee outcomes. I’m tired of treating my body like a project I can perfect if I work hard enough.But I don’t know how to stop.We’ve been sold this idea that we can master our circumstances if we optimise enough, hustle enough, and self-improve enough. And I’ve bought into it. Even when I read Epictetus telling me it’s an illusion, part of me is looking for the hack, the technique, the way to master the art of not needing to master things.I’m trying to control my need to control.A few weeks ago, I wrote what I thought was a good article, but it didn’t get enough traction. I spent hours fretting, trying to justify why I write, reminding myself that the pure joy it gives me is the reason I write.Epictetus would ask: “Is their attention to your article within your control?” And I’d have to admit it’s not. But then I’d check the post again to see if more people read it.The Moments BetweenThere are moments, though. Brief ones.Yesterday morning, I went for a run. My mind was quiet for once, watching the skyline and my breath. I realised I’d forgotten to worry about all the things I tend to worry about. I was there, in my body, not trying to control anything.It didn’t last. By the time I got home, I was checking my phone, monitoring my metrics, spinning back into the familiar anxiety. But for a few minutes, I got a glimpse of what Epictetus might be pointing toward.Maybe there’s no technique for this. Maybe it’s not something you achieve and then have. Maybe it’s more like those mindful moments when running—they come when you’re not trying to make them come. Or when I’m writing this post, listening to neoclassical music while smoking a cigar, and a few hours fly by.I catch myself sometimes, mid-worry spiral, and I can see it happening. I can see that I’m making myself miserable over something I can’t control.And sometimes I can let it go for a moment. Not because I’ve mastered anything, but because the effort of holding on feels heavier than the relief of letting go.Then my mind grabs onto something else, and we’re off again.It’s 5:30 a.m. NowThe birds are starting their chorus. The light is changing from black to deep blue.My worries haven’t disappeared. I care about my health, my work, and how I’m perceived. I’m still trying to control things I can’t control.But I’m sitting here, watching the light change, and for this moment, I’m not trying to fix any of it.Epictetus was onto something, even if I can’t get there myself.Maybe that space between stimulus and response isn’t something you find once and then have. Maybe it’s something you glimpse, lose, and keep discovering again at dawn or in the middle of ordinary moments when you’ve forgotten to be anxious about everything.Right now, the coffee is good. The birds are singing. Sassy is curled up on my desk, and I’m smiling.And for now, that’s enough of a place to start.I’d be curious—do you struggle with trying to control things you can’t? How do you (or don’t you) find those moments of peace with uncertainty? controlEpictetusHYROX Mo Issa Previous Previous Am I Living A Small Life? Next Next When Utopia Arrives Before Readiness --- ### When Utopia Arrives Before Readiness Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/utopia Description: I’ve heard countless predictions about AI and automation. Most wash over me like background noise. But this one landed differently. Maybe because surgery feels so fundamentally human—hands, judgment, years of training, life and death. Or maybe because at 57, I’m old enough to remember when computers couldn’t beat humans at chess, and young enough that I’ll likely live to see machines do everything I once thought made us irreplaceable. When Utopia Arrives Before Readiness 29 Jan Written By Mo Issa At 57, I live with questions about relevance.A few days ago, I was walking and listening to a podcast—Stephen Bartlett in conversation with Konstantin Kisin. At one point, Kisin mentioned how Tesla won’t be remembered for making cars, but for making robots. Then came the line that stopped me mid-stride: Elon Musk predicting that surgeons could be replaced within three years.Three years.I’ve heard countless predictions about AI and automation. Most wash over me like background noise. But this one landed differently. Maybe because surgery feels so fundamentally human—hands, judgment, years of training, life and death. Or maybe because at 57, I’m old enough to remember when computers couldn’t beat humans at chess, and young enough that I’ll likely live to see machines do everything I once thought made us irreplaceable.The technological utopia everyone talks about isn’t some distant future. It’s going to happen while I’m still alive. And I realized: I have no idea what I’m for in that world.The Collapse of the Old EquationThis disorientation isn’t just personal—it’s civilizational. And it stems from an equation that’s breaking in real time.For most of history, survival was the problem. Food, shelter, safety. Progress meant solving scarcity. Meaning followed struggle. Our institutions, cultures, and moral codes evolved around one basic fact: life was hard, and work mattered because it kept you alive.Sebastian Junger said something that names what we’re losing:“Humans don’t mind hardship; in fact, they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.”This is the knife’s edge we’re walking.Technology—especially AI and robotics—is rapidly removing the necessity of human labour. Not all at once, not evenly, but decisively. Driving, logistics, administration, analysis, even medicine and creativity are being automated. Value creation is drifting away from human effort and toward machines owned by very few.Materially, this points toward abundance. Cheaper goods, better medicine, less drudgery. In theory, more freedom. A kind of modern utopia.But psychologically, culturally, politically—we are nowhere near ready for it.Our societies still tie dignity to productivity. Identity to occupation. Worth to contribution. When work disappears, meaning doesn’t automatically replace it. It collapses. And into that vacuum rush resentment, extremism, nostalgia, and ideology.Europe: A Society Structurally UnpreparedEurope crystallises this paradox, and growing up in England makes it feel as if Europe is me.Comfortable, ageing, highly regulated, morally confident—but economically fragile and strategically weak. It behaves as if the old order still exists: rules, norms, safety nets, endless peace.Meanwhile, the world outside is reverting to power, leverage, deterrence, and speed.Kisin puts it bluntly: “Europe as a continent mistook peace for permanence and comfort for strength.”What does structural unpreparedness look like in practice? Europe built high-welfare states while hollowing out industrial capacity and strategic capability. It celebrated closing coal plants while outsourcing emissions to China, then shipping the goods back. It designed elaborate systems to protect workers in stable employment, just as the gig economy made stable employment obsolete. It assumed America would always provide security, so it could spend on comfort instead of defence.The result: a society that optimised for the world that was, not the world that’s coming. Comfort without strength. Intentions without outcomes. Moral clarity without material capability.And now, for ordinary Europeans, the future looks like stagnation. They feel poorer year by year. The safety net strains. The next generation cannot afford what the previous one took for granted. Political instability bleeds across borders. The society promised abundance, but delivered managed decline.This is what happens when utopia’s infrastructure arrives, but the psychological and structural readiness doesn’t. You get the costs without the benefits. The disruption without the flourishing.Two Kinds of DangerUtopia arriving before readiness creates two dangers.The first is moral confusion. We mistake intentions for outcomes. We prioritise what feels good over what works. We celebrate the closing of a factory because it reduces local emissions, while ignoring that we’ve simply moved production to a country with worse standards, and then congratulate ourselves for our virtue. We design welfare systems with compassion, then watch them buckle under conditions they weren’t built for, and respond by insisting the problem is insufficient compassion rather than structural mismatch.This isn’t about right or left. It’s about the gap between the world we’re designing policy for and the world that actually exists.The second danger is psychological decay. When people are told they are unnecessary—by markets, by machines, by elites—they don’t become enlightened. They become angry. Or numb. Or tribal.A society that can’t answer “What are you for?” cannot survive abundance. Meaning doesn’t emerge from material comfort. It emerges from necessity, contribution, struggle, and purpose.Strip those away without replacement, and people don’t transcend—they fracture.This is why politics has become so polarised across the US, UK, and Europe. It’s not primarily about policy disagreements. It’s about people feeling the ground shift beneath them and reaching for anything solid—tribe, ideology, nostalgia, rage.When the future no longer offers a clear path—study, work, progress, meaning—people don’t ask for inspiration. They ask for protection.The Work That Actually MattersMy question about relevance at 57 is everyone’s question now, just compressed. If machines can do what I do, what am I for? If my skills become obsolete, what’s left? If contribution is no longer required for survival, where does dignity come from?These aren’t abstract philosophical puzzles. They’re urgent, practical, civilizational questions.And here’s what I’ve come to believe: the work ahead is not technological. The machines will advance regardless.The work is human.Rebuilding meaning. Redefining contribution. Designing systems where people are not only supported, but needed in ways that go beyond economic output. Finding new answers to the oldest question: what are humans for?Because if we can’t answer that—if we arrive at material abundance without purpose, comfort without necessity, leisure without meaning—we won’t get utopia. We’ll get collapse with better healthcare.Living the QuestionI don’t have the answer. I’m not sure anyone does yet.But I know the question won’t go away by ignoring it. And I know that meaning, purpose, feeling necessary—these aren’t luxuries that emerge automatically from abundance. They have to be built. Chosen. Created.Living consciously means making ourselves feel necessary, like we’re an important part of something larger than our individual survival. Not because we have to be, but because we choose to be.The surgeon in three years might be a robot.But the question of what makes a life worth living will still be ours to answer.Utopia isn’t dangerous because it’s impossible. It’s dangerous because if it arrives too early—before we’ve learned what comes next—it strips away the structures that taught us how to live.The technological future is coming whether we’re ready or not.The question is: what will we be for when we no longer have to be anything at all? When Utopia Arrives Before ReadinessUtopiaReadinessStephen BartlettKonstantin KisinElon Musk Mo Issa Previous Previous The One Thing We Actually Control Next Next What Are You Willing to Suffer For? --- ### What Are You Willing to Suffer For? Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/willing-to-suffer Description: Demis Hassabis was a chess prodigy at the age of four. By his early teens, he competed at the highest levels and could have pursued a comfortable, prestigious life in that narrow domain. But at thirteen, he did something unusual: he walked away. What Are You Willing to Suffer For? 22 Jan Written By Mo Issa “A man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.” — Alexis de Tocqueville Demis Hassabis was a chess prodigy at the age of four. By his early teens, he competed at the highest levels and could have pursued a comfortable, prestigious life in that narrow domain. But at thirteen, he did something unusual: he walked away.He realised that excelling at chess, however impressive, wouldn’t help him solve the problems that truly mattered. So he pivoted—toward computer science, neuroscience, and eventually artificial intelligence.That decision reveals something essential about meaning: it isn’t about talent or even passion alone. It’s about what you decide is worth the cost of a life.Hassabis didn’t trade one easy path for another. He chose a harder, longer one. Years of study, uncertainty, failed experiments, financial risk, and relentless effort followed.Founding DeepMind wasn’t glamorous at the start. The breakthroughs—AlphaGo, AlphaFold and Google buying him out—came much later, after sustained commitment. The Nobel Prize, the knighthood, the recognition: footnotes. (By the way, he’s now the head of Google’s Artificial Intelligence Division and rumoured to be the next Google CEO.)The real story is that he chose something difficult, meaningful, and consuming, then stayed with it long enough to be transformed.That’s where any honest conversation about goal setting and behaviour change should begin.Most of us start the year asking the wrong question: What do I want? Or worse: What would make me happier?But happiness, as we experience it today, is thin and unreliable.Aristotle described happiness not as pleasure or comfort, but as eudaimonia—flourishing. A condition of wholeness where the practical needs of life and the deeper needs of the soul are integrated. When either side is neglected, life becomes distorted.Comfort without meaning breeds restlessness. Ideals without grounding lead to exhaustion.Yet even flourishing doesn’t fully capture what modern life demands. Because happiness, however refined, cannot sustain us through suffering. Meaning can. Meaning allows us to endure difficulty without bitterness.As Arthur C. Brooks writes, meaning is built from coherence, purpose, and significance—life making sense, life moving somewhere, life mattering. Without that, even abundance feels unbearable.Strip it all down, and meaning comes from three things: passion, purpose, and effort. Not inspiration. Not intention. Effort. This is where goals stop being fantasies and become serious.Passion matters because it reveals what we care about—the inner pull toward something that feels alive. But passion alone isn’t enough. Everyone has interests. Few are willing to endure the friction passion inevitably brings.The real question isn’t what you want in the upcoming year, but what pain you’re willing to go through to get it.I love writing—not the idea of being a writer, but the actual work: drafting, rewriting, cutting, publishing, sitting with doubt. That suffering feels meaningful.However, the idea of speaking at corporate conferences, though lucrative and quite accessible for me, is not something I can bear day in and day out. I can’t labour through the PowerPoint presentations, the headline clichés that must be delivered, and the superficial relationships that follow. At the end of each engagement, I felt purposeless.Purpose gives suffering direction. It turns private passion into a life-plot. Purpose always points beyond the self—it emerges when what matters to you begins to matter to others.Nietzsche wrote that he who has a why can bear almost any how. The how is the grind, the boredom, the repetition, the setbacks. The why makes that grind intelligible rather than punishing. Without purpose, effort feels like self-harm. With purpose, it feels like initiation.Effort is where everything becomes real. Khalil Gibran said it perfectly: work is love made visible. Ideas don’t transform us. Struggle does. We don’t admire people for what they believe, but for what they’ve endured and completed.Goals that don’t require sacrifice don’t change us. They decorate life, but they don’t shape it.Which brings me to the second truth about goals: they’re not only about what you achieve, but about who you become.I’m doing a HYROX race in May—not because I care about the event itself, but because of the person the training demands. It requires stamina, strength, recovery, and most of all, showing up to the training day after day.It forces me to live differently and uncomfortably for months. The finish line is incidental. The identity forged along the way is the point.A goal that doesn’t reshape you isn’t worth much.None of this works without continuity. Nothing meaningful is built in short bursts. Staying is harder than starting. To stay is to pass through boredom, doubt, failure, and repetition.Modern life worships variety, but depth comes from loyalty—to a craft, a discipline, a way of living.Without consistency, people drift, negotiating with themselves every morning for motivation. Exhaustion follows when nothing higher pulls us forward. Boredom terrifies us because it reveals a will with nothing to aim at.So here’s where I land.A good goal isn’t something you want. It’s something you’re willing to suffer for.Something that justifies blood, sweat, frustration, and time. Something that changes who you are while you pursue it.Demis Hassabis didn’t build a meaningful life by chasing happiness or prestige. He chose a difficult problem, accepted the cost, and allowed the work to shape him.That’s the only standard we should trust.Don’t ask what you want this year.Ask what pain you’re willing to accept.Ask who that pain will make you.Choose goals that demand something real from you.Choose goals that hurt in a way that feels true.That’s not how you achieve more.That’s how you live whole. What Are You Willing to Suffer For?Demis HassabisThe Nobel PrizeknighthoodGoogle CEOArthur C. BrooksHYROXgoal2026 Mo Issa Previous Previous When Utopia Arrives Before Readiness Next Next The Art of 'Unselfing' --- ### The Art of 'Unselfing' Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/the-art-of-unselfing Description: The guide tells me to ignore the shrieks of the baboons that populate the reserve. They are not close at all. I relax and, within an hour, ascend to the summit of a small hill, arriving at several large granite boulders. I follow the guide’s path, pull myself up, and sprawl on the highest flat spot available. The Art of 'Unselfing' 4 Dec Written By Mo Issa An hour into my trek, with the sun beating hard on me and the thorns from the dry grassland chaffing my bare legs, I ask myself the question. “Why am I doing this?”I persevere and advance into the savannah-covered plains and a smallish forest. Then I climb up one of the five hills that make up “The Shai Hills Reserve,” a 51 square kilometre forest reserve close to Accra and an hour’s drive from my house.The guide tells me to ignore the shrieks of the baboons that populate the reserve. They are not close at all. I relax and, within an hour, ascend to the summit of a small hill, arriving at several large granite boulders. I follow the guide’s path, pull myself up, and sprawl on the highest flat spot available.I sit down to take it all in. I look down at the grassland below and the hazy horizon ahead of me. I’m lost for a few minutes. The baboon shrieks echo around me and mix with the sound of leaves rustling from the trees below, hypnotising me.There is a slight breeze that strokes my neck and face, further extending my bliss.I spent the next fifteen minutes thinking of nothing. I had no intention of meditating, but somehow, nature forced it on me.Now, one idea dominates my thoughts: it took me almost 150 minutes of struggle to reach this isolated spot and only 15 minutes for me to lose myself in its bliss.The Strange Gift of Losing YourselfThat moment reminded me of something the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch spent her life exploring.Murdoch (1919–1999) was one of those rare minds who could write both sharp moral philosophy and wild, imaginative novels. Her 26 books — The Bell, The Black Prince, The Sea, The Sea — are filled with characters constantly wrestling with their own egos, illusions, and desires.And one of her big ideas was what she called “unselfing.”Murdoch believed that most of our suffering comes from being trapped in the “fat, relentless ego” — the part of the mind that never stops narrating, worrying, defending, comparing. The self that always makes everything about itself.But beauty, she said, can break that spell.Not beauty in the superficial sense, but the kind that pulls you out of your own head — a landscape, a painting, a moment in nature, a flash of colour on a bird’s wing. Anything that draws your attention outward, away from your ego’s constant chatter.In The Sovereignty of Good, she offers one of the clearest descriptions of this:“I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind…Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel.In a moment everything is altered.The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared.There is nothing now but kestrel…And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important.”That is unselfing.The ego collapses. Beauty takes over. And reality — clean, unfiltered reality — returns.Why These Moments MatterWhat happened to me on that hill wasn’t planned. It wasn’t a meditation session. It wasn’t a goal. It was simply nature doing what it does when you give it enough time and enough attention.It empties you.For a moment, you stop being the person with problems, deadlines, identity, and ambition. You’re just a witness. A pair of eyes. A body breathing on a rock.And when the self comes back — because it always does — it feels lighter. Less dramatic. Less convinced of its own importance.Exactly as Murdoch describes.The Real Good Life Might Begin HereWe spend so much time trying to “find ourselves.”Murdoch suggests something different: sometimes we need to lose ourselves first.Not permanently. Not escapism.Just enough to see clearly again.A kestrel.A view from a hill in Shai Hills.A moment where the wind erases your thoughts.These aren’t luxuries. They’re reminders.The world is still bigger than whatever problem is screaming in your mind.And beauty, when it hits you at the right moment, can still pull you back to what’s real.Maybe the good life isn’t about constant self-improvement.Maybe it’s about learning how to step out of the self long enough to remember that you’re alive. UnselfingLosing Yourself Mo Issa Previous Previous What Are You Willing to Suffer For? Next Next Stop Chasing Many Rabbits --- ### Stop Chasing Many Rabbits Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/stop-chasing-many-rabbits Description: Years ago, when Tesla was struggling to meet its production targets, Elon Musk did something extreme even by his own standards: he moved his desk onto the factory floor. Stop Chasing Many Rabbits 20 Nov Written By Mo Issa Years ago, when Tesla was struggling to meet its production targets, Elon Musk did something extreme even by his own standards: he moved his desk onto the factory floor.Not in a meeting room. Not in an office above the plant. Onto the floor itself.He slept there.He worked there.He lived there — sometimes sleeping only two or three hours a night — until the numbers shifted.And they did.In early 2018, Tesla was producing just 2,000 Model 3s a week. A few months later — after Musk’s shift to living inside the factory — Tesla hit its long-shot goal of 5,000 Model 3s per week by the end of June.Production in Q4 2018 reached over 61,000 Model 3s.The numbers alone tell the story: maniacal focus works.Musk wasn’t performing magic. He wasn’t motivated by brilliance. He simply locked onto one thing and refused to look away until the result matched the vision.And that’s the part that always gets me — because it reveals something uncomfortable and straightforward:Success is mostly a matter of holding your attention on one thing for far longer than anyone else is willing to. This is exactly what Gary Keller argues in The One Thing. He opens with a brutal proverb:“If you chase two rabbits, you’ll catch none.”Keller studied high achievers — CEOs, athletes, creators — and found one shared discipline: they narrow their field of vision.They eliminate noise. They don’t scatter their energy. They sequence their life.His core idea is sharp:Extraordinary results come from narrowing your focus until only the essential remains.Not ten things. Not five.One.Success, Keller says, is sequential, not simultaneous. You lay bricks in one direction until momentum takes over.Why Sustained Focus Feels Good (The Neuroscience)Deep focus isn’t just productive — it’s neurochemically rewarding.Dopamine rises (and doesn’t drop) through effort-driven engagement — the slow, steady dopamine of mastery and progress, not the cheap spikes from scrolling. It teaches the brain that staying with a task feels good.Serotonin rises through long-term direction.It stabilises mood, reduces anxiety, and creates inner groundedness. When you commit to one path for months or years, the brain relaxes because it knows where it’s going.That blend — progress + meaning — is why people who focus deeply often look calmer, clearer, and more alive. My Own Lesson in PerseveranceDuring the COVID pandemic, on one Sunday, July 14th, I sat under a palm tree — my so-called Bodhi tree — for hours of reflection. The sky was turning gold. A soft breeze moved through the leaves. I felt like the last person alive. And the peace I felt didn’t come from thinking — it came from stopping.Something loosened that day.I let go of resentment, judgment, regret — the belief that I had wasted my potential. I saw clearly that I’d been operating at 40% of who I could be. And for the first time, I told myself it was okay. Those fifty-plus years weren’t mistakes — they were preparation.An image kept appearing: a spiritual warrior.Not a monk. Not a samurai.A version of me — calm, strong, smiling.A mix of Rumi, Gibran, Hemingway, and Alan Watts.That day became my new starting point.I realised I would no longer explain my philosophy — I would embody it.And that meant discipline, action, and the long, hard road of self-mastery. The three Ps — pain, patience, perseverance — the ones I had avoided most of my life — became non-negotiable.I narrowed my focus, cut out the unnecessary aspects of my life.I began with my body.My body has always been my doorway inward. When I work out or play padel, I come alive. When I eat poorly, everything dulls. But I had never pushed past the pain barrier into true transformation.I always stopped short.So I set a challenge: build the body of a spiritual warrior in my mid-fifties — strong, resilient, focused — not for aesthetics, but to prove I could finish something difficult.It required months of diet changes, strength training, stretching, cardio, and restarting after injuries. It was slow. It was frustrating. Many days, I wanted to quit.But I didn’t.And that perseverance spread.It flowed into my writing, where months of blank screens eventually became my memoir. Then came the battle to publish it — a failed publisher, delays, wasted money — until it finally came out in November 2024.It flowed into my business, where I’ve been slowly turning around a company anchored in old habits and bad culture — still the most challenging journey of my life, but finally moving in the right direction.It flowed into my inner life, where I returned to reading, journalling, and the practices that make me feel alive.One act of sustained focus bleeds into the next.The long road builds a different kind of person. The Real Point of All ThisLooking back, the truth is clear:My life has only changed when I picked one direction and stayed with it long enough for it to shape me.Not when I scattered my energy.Not when I jumped between ideas.Not when I chased inspiration.But when I chose one thing and stayed with it through pain, boredom, frustration — and time.Gary Keller, the neuroscientists, and Musk sleeping on a factory floor are all pointing at the same truth:Depth comes from devotion.Devotion comes from repetition.Repetition becomes identity. The Conclusion I Can’t IgnoreIf I want to build my next chapter — in my body, my writing, my business — the question is brutally simple:What is the one thing that deserves my sustained, unwavering focus?Because once I choose it, everything else becomes noise.And the life I want — the life of the spiritual warrior I saw under that palm tree — becomes inevitable. Mo Issa Previous Previous The Art of 'Unselfing' Next Next If God Is Dead, Then What? --- ### If God Is Dead, Then What? Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/if-god-is-dead-then-what Description: We no longer needed God to explain the laws of the universe; we had physics and philosophy. Governments no longer required divine right; rational consent was enough. For the first time in history, humanity stood on its own feet — and found the ground strangely hollow beneath them. If God Is Dead, Then What? 13 Nov Written By Mo Issa When Nietzsche declared, “God is dead,” he wasn’t being rebellious — he was being prophetic.He saw what was already unfolding in the modern mind: that faith in a divine order was quietly collapsing under the weight of reason, science, and the Enlightenment.We no longer needed God to explain the laws of the universe; we had physics and philosophy. Governments no longer required divine right; rational consent was enough. For the first time in history, humanity stood on its own feet — and found the ground strangely hollow beneath them.Nietzsche didn’t mean that a deity had literally died; he meant that our idea of God — the framework that once gave meaning to everything — had dissolved. The moral scaffolding that shaped Western civilisation was suddenly without a foundation.We had pulled the anchor, and though the ship of reason set sail, we were drifting in open waters.It’s little wonder that two world wars followed Nietzsche’s prophecy.Without God as the source of morality or truth, what comes next for us?I’ve come to live with three possibilities.The first is the traditional one: ignore Nietzsche as a madman. There is a God — a creator, a single deity ruling over all of us. We must follow dogmatic rules and go to heaven or face the wrath of hell. I find that idea hard to hold, because if that God exists, He’s not in the habit of explaining Himself.The second possibility is stranger — that everything we call “reality” is a kind of simulation, a dream of consciousness.And the third possibility, the one I return to again and again, is that I don’t know if there is a God. I don’t know what will happen after death.That’s where Albert Camus’s absurdism speaks to me. Life is absurd because we keep asking questions the universe refuses to answer. We stand at the edge of infinity shouting Why?, and all we hear back is silence.But in that silence, I find an invitation — to live anyway. To live fully.If I accept that I don’t know who’s running the show or what awaits me after death, then I become responsible for creating my own meaning.So I live as if meaning is made through experience.Life, to me, is about expanding my range — mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually. To read deeply, to feel deeply, to build, to fail, to forgive, to love. To test myself against the world and, through that testing, to grow.I don’t want a life of hedonism. Pleasure without growth feels hollow. But neither do I want a life of quiet resignation. I like both the beauty and the struggle — the stillness of a sunset and the sweat of hard work.Even in my daily life, with all its frustrations, challenges, and small victories, it feels like part of that same spiritual experiment. The same with relationships — they’re where I learn patience, humility, and surrender. They test the edges of my ego.And whenever I doubt the world and feel the pull of nihilism, I turn to the great thinkers, poets, and writers — and I sigh with relief, inhaling a fresh breath of hope as they reassure my inner knowing(feeling) that there is something bigger than all of us.Elizabeth Gilbert captures this yearning beautifully in The Signature of All Things: “There is a supreme intelligence in the universe which wishes for communion with us. This supreme intelligence longs to be known. It calls out to us. It draws us close to its mystery and grants us these remarkable minds so that we try to reach for it. It wants us to find it. It wants union with us, more than anything.” And Rumi, in Say I Am You, reminds us that the divinity we seek outside is already within: “I am dust particles in sunlight.I am the round sun.To the bits of dust I say, Stay.To the sun, Keep moving…I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy,the evolutionary intelligence, the lift, and the falling away.What is, and what isn’t.You who know, Jelaluddin,You the one in all, say who I am.Say I am you.” The same force that moves the stars breathes through our lungs. To say “I am you” is to recognise that separation is an illusion — God, nature, and the self are all expressions of the same consciousness.The White Lotus moment(Season 3, Episode 6)In one scene, Timothy visits a Buddhist monastery and asks the chief monk, Luang, what happens when we die. The monk answers with a simple yet profound metaphor: life is like a drop of water rising from the ocean — separate for a time — only to return to that same ocean at death. “Death,” he says, “is a happy return, like coming home.”We enter life as the ocean — pure consciousness — and become a wave to experience individuality. That image moves me. Because maybe that’s what we are: temporary forms through which the ocean gets to feel itself.Still, the question remains — who or what makes the wave rise? I don’t know. And maybe I don’t need to.Because meaning isn’t something I find; it’s something I live into. Every run, every book, every business decision, every argument, every act of forgiveness, every breath in meditation — all of it adds to the pie of experience that shapes my soul.So I live without certainty, but with wonder.My faith isn’t in dogma. It’s in aliveness — in the mysterious fact that I’m here at all, thinking, feeling, reaching.That’s my God. Mo Issa Previous Previous Stop Chasing Many Rabbits Next Next Why I'm Stopping Sugar --- ### Why I'm Stopping Sugar Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/the-hard-joy-of-self-mastery Description: Comfort, I’ve realised, is the great sedative. It kills growth, courage, and creativity. Self-mastery is the antidote. Saying no to sugar, or to a screen, or to that second drink, is the same act that says yes to meaning, to work, to love. It’s all one movement — toward coherence. Why I'm Stopping Sugar 6 Nov Written By Mo Issa I’ve decided to quit sugar — to say no to the baked cheesecakes in the afternoon, late-night Lindt chocolate, and the Pain perdu at my favourite restaurant.Why? Because it’s a deep craving I’ve carried since childhood.And, it’s also time I fought back against the noble lie our society keeps selling us — that an easy, sanitised life is the good life.Last week was a tumultuous one. A family crisis left me shaken. It felt like watching someone vanish into a void of their own making. Powerless. Lost. Gone.The experience jolted me into remembering something I often forget: I’m here not merely to live or to feel, but to choose — to act, to align, to live well.But the good life isn’t the easy life. It demands the strength to resist the path of least resistance.Damon Linker, in his essay “Self-Mastery Is Good”, Actually, argues that our modern world has become a vast experiment in engineered temptation. We swim in it like fish in water — unaware of how completely we’re surrounded by forces designed to weaken our will.Social media, porn, gambling, instant shopping, on-demand everything — the world is now a machine built not just to satisfy desire, but to create it. Rousseau saw this coming centuries ago when he wrote that modern society manufactures wants that no one originally had.Today, capitalism doesn’t just sell things; it sells experiences — bursts of dopamine disguised as life.It’s a perfect storm: endless digital pleasure combined with a culture that dismantled the old supports that once helped us resist temptation. We tore down the “judgmental” systems — religion, duty, tradition, shame, even conscience — and replaced them with slogans like follow your bliss and if it feels good, do it. That revolution liberated us, but it also left us defenceless.Now, as Linker says, we’re alone with our devices, unable to say no, half-relying on hacks and chemicals to do the job our souls once did — Ozempic instead of restraint, or “digital detox weekend” instead of scaling back our daily phone use.Reading that, I saw myself. I reach for sugar when I’m tired. I scroll when I’m restless. I rationalise when I should refuse.But self-mastery isn’t repression — it’s reclaiming dignity. It’s rebuilding muscle in a world that keeps offering us machines to do the lifting for us.So quitting sugar isn’t just about health. It’s a symbolic act of resistance. If I can say no to dessert, maybe I can say no to distraction, to comfort, to mediocrity. Maybe it’s the small, consistent refusals that forge the unbreakable spine of a man.The decision terrifies me — the cravings, the withdrawals, the quiet negotiations my mind will invent. But that’s the point. Every refusal reminds me I’m not just an animal chasing dopamine.Yesterday, I shaved my head and beard. I looked younger, lighter, less “wise,” perhaps — but more alive. That small ritual felt like clearing a path toward something harder, truer.Maybe that’s what self-mastery really is: stripping away the accumulated softness of convenience until what’s left is essence — raw, direct, capable.Linker argues that we’ve built a civilisation where every pleasure is a click away, even as we dismantle the inner and social scaffolding that once fortified the will. Pleasure itself isn’t evil; it’s simply too easy now, too frictionless.Real life is supposed to have friction. A real conversation is messy; a real meal takes time; a real workout burns. Our devices, on the other hand, offer the simulation of satisfaction without the cost — pleasure without discipline.So we outsource willpower to apps and pills, to reminders and restrictions. But there’s a loss in this outsourcing — a moral and spiritual atrophy. There’s a world of difference between not using your phone for 48 hours and not mastering the urge not to use it. Between taking a drug to suppress appetite and looking at the dessert, wanting it, and choosing to say no.That’s the muscle we’re losing — the one that lets us act not out of impulse but out of understanding. It’s the same muscle I want to rebuild in every area of my life.At work, it means leading without rescuing — stepping back to coach, to trust, to stop doing other people’s jobs. Even that is a form of mastery: the discipline not to intervene.Physically, I need the same rigour. My body feels slower, my stamina weaker. Padel is fun, but it’s not enough. I miss the clean exhaustion of running, the deep breathing that feels like prayer. I’m scared of injury, yes — but more scared of comfort.Comfort, I’ve realised, is the great sedative. It kills growth, courage, and creativity. Self-mastery is the antidote. Saying no to sugar, or to a screen, or to that second drink, is the same act that says yes to meaning, to work, to love. It’s all one movement — toward coherence.We live in a world that confuses ease with freedom. But the truth is the opposite: the harder the path, the freer the soul.That’s the paradox — the hard joy of self-mastery.So this is where I begin again: no sugar, more cardio, sharper focus, and a weekly rhythm of writing that doesn’t depend on mood. Writing itself is resistance — against distraction, against fragmentation, against forgetting who I am.Every time I refuse an easy pleasure, I remember what real joy feels like — earned, not given. The cold plunge, the run, the honest work, the stillness after doing what I said I would do.Self-mastery isn’t about control. It’s about remembering who’s in charge, about living from the inside out when everything around you tries to pull you apart. Self-Help Mo Issa Previous Previous If God Is Dead, Then What? Next Next Beyond the Quick Fix: How I Found Depth After Self-Help --- ### Beyond the Quick Fix: How I Found Depth After Self-Help Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/beyond-the-quick-fix Description: I devoured books the way some people binge on sweets—self-help manuals, spiritual guides, popular psychology, even esoteric teachings promising enlightenment. Beyond the Quick Fix: How I Found Depth After Self-Help 23 Oct Written By Mo Issa “We read [the great works] to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find. ” — Harold Bloom The Hunger for MoreI devoured books the way some people binge on sweets—self-help manuals, spiritual guides, popular psychology, even esoteric teachings promising enlightenment.If a new author or guru claimed to reveal the secret, I was there, notebook open, underlining sentences as if they contained the formula to life itself.But instead of clarity, I found confusion. The business I had built slipped out of focus as I experimented with various projects that never quite took hold—foundations, seminars, coaching. Each new effort felt like a spark that should have turned into fire, but instead fizzled into smoke.And yet, I continued to feed myself with books, podcasts, and retreats, convinced that just one more piece of knowledge might unlock the door.The paradox of self-help is that it begins with the premise that we are broken and thrives on keeping us in a state of perpetual seeking.If the promise of self-help were true, why did I never stop at the one illuminating book or seminar? Why did I, like so many others, become addicted to the next insight, the following technique?The industry thrives on that very hunger. I waited for the single satori moment that would transform my life—but the more I searched, the more restless I became. Lessons Along the WayNot everything I read was wasted.Buddha’s Four Noble Truths taught me responsibility for my own peace. Hemingway reminded me that truth must be lived before it can be written. Hesse’s Siddhartha mirrored my own wandering search.These voices planted seeds, even if I lacked the patience to let them grow roots.Still, I often felt like a man drowning in a sea of knowledge, mistaking variety for depth.I understood concepts intellectually, but rarely stayed with them long enough for them to shape me.I jumped from the Law of Attraction to the subconscious mind, from Reiki to chakras, from leadership seminars to Rumi’s poetry.Each promised a doorway, but I left before truly entering.It took years—and one piece of advice from my MFA tutor—to realise what I was missing. My MFA Tutor’s LessonWhen I was writing my memoir during my MFA, my tutor paused after reading a few of my chapters and said, almost gently:“Stay narrow and go deep until you hit something true.”Those words landed like a quiet revelation.I had been writing the way I’d been living: chasing breadth instead of depth. I wanted to include every experience, every insight, as if completeness would somehow equal meaning.But meaning doesn’t come from collecting—it comes from carving.From staying long enough in one place to see what’s really there.That advice changed not only my writing, but also how I approached my entire life. From Dazzle to DepthFor years, self-help had dazzled me with quick fixes and slogans.It was fast food for the soul—tasty, addictive, and ultimately unsatisfying.Proper nourishment required something slower, denser, and harder to chew.Depth, I began to understand, isn’t about sophistication or intellect.It’s about patience, discernment, and the courage to stay with what resists you.It’s what happens when you stop chasing novelty and start cultivating understanding.Self-help was my entry point, but philosophy and literature became my deeper current.Socrates dared me to ask more.Montaigne showed me that my journal and personal essays are explorations, not answers.Nietzsche turned my life upside down.These thinkers/writers didn’t promise transformation—they somehow manifested it in me.Their works challenged me, but also, they enlarged me.“Had I stayed only with what was easy or familiar, I would have remained circling endlessly around what was comforting.” Staying With the DifficultDepth is born not from following what’s popular, but from staying long enough with what challenges us.It means being willing to be defeated by a book—to reevaluate, to wrestle, to sit in discomfort until something gives.It means recognising that Tolstoy offers something more enduring than any pop-psychology bestseller—not because he is fashionable, but because he widens our vision of what it means to live and to love.My years of wandering through self-help were not wasted. They were the beginning of depth.They taught me to listen to myself—but also revealed the danger of listening only to myself.To move forward, I had to aspire to more: to struggle through texts that felt impenetrable, to ask not “What do I like?” but “What can I grow to understand if I let it shape me?” What I Now KnowToday, I no longer treat any single book, teacher, or practice as the answer.I see them as companions—sparks that light the next step.The responsibility is mine: to linger, to reflect, to return.To keep digging until something inside me shifts.My so-called failures were not failures at all, but necessary detours in cultivating depth—and shaping a life that feels truly my own.“Depth, like purpose, is not given. It is earned through patience, persistence, and the willingness to be transformed.” Mo Issa Previous Previous Why I'm Stopping Sugar Next Next Hoping for (Inner) Rain --- ### Hoping for (Inner) Rain Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/inner-rain Description: Not because I dislike the game — I love it, maybe too much. But if it rains, I won’t have to play. That’s how far it’s come: I’m praying for bad weather to save me from my own compulsions. Hoping for (Inner) Rain 16 Oct Written By Mo Issa I. The Ache Before the RainI wake up with a sore neck and a sharp ache in my elbow.Another padel tournament awaits me today.I should be excited, but instead I find myself staring at the sky, hoping it rains.Not because I dislike the game — I love it, maybe too much. But if it rains, I won’t have to play. That’s how far it’s come: I’m praying for bad weather to save me from my own compulsions.I’m tired. I haven’t been sleeping well — six hours a night, light and restless. My Oura ring confirms what my body already knows: deep sleep has deserted me.And yet, nothing dramatic is happening. No crises, no major stress. Life, if anything, is calmer than usual. So why do I feel drained?II. Reading as OxygenOne thing that still keeps me alive — really alive, is reading. I’m deep into Ian McEwan’s latest novel. What a literary giant. The way he crafts a story— shocks, awes and intrigues you all in one sitting.I finished it hungry for more and have now picked up When Nietzsche Wept. Yalom may not have McEwan’s mastery of language, but perhaps he’ll make up for it with psychological insight — something to help me enter Nietzsche’s mind, not just his myth.We all need some daily ‘vital engagement’ that pulls us beyond ourselves. For me, that hour of reading deep books (Literary, Philosophy, Psychology, History) in the morning has become my anchor.Reading feels like oxygen. It’s not for a goal anymore. I read because I want to feel alive again — to sit inside thought rather than scroll through fragments.III. The Weight of the WorldBut when I lift my eyes from the page, the world feels heavy. Every headline is bait. Every story exaggerated, every tragedy sold for clicks.Outrage has become the default mode of attention—the new oxygen — addictive, shallow, and depleting.The news is no longer there to inform us but to exhaust us — to keep us angry, scrolling, hooked.Sometimes I think our nervous systems were never designed for this much stimulation, this much access to other people’s pain and stupidity.In quieter moments, I sense a kind of despair — not about one specific issue, but about the collective fatigue of living in a world that never stops shouting.IV. Presence Without the PhoneLately I’ve been thinking about presence — real, unmediated presence. What happens when I leave my phone in another room?At first, it feels wrong. I reach for it automatically, as if my hand has a memory of its own. But after ten, fifteen minutes, something softens. I start noticing the birds, the light on the table, and the taste of coffee. The world returns.It’s strange that something so simple feels revolutionary — to be here, without a screen.James Clear writes in Atomic Habits that change isn’t about massive overhauls but small, consistent actions that align with who you want to become. Every decision, he says, is a vote for the kind of person you wish to be.Perhaps the simplest habit is to leave the phone behind.Not as a grand act of discipline, but as a small daily vote for attention, for calm, for being where you are.Each time you resist the scroll, you cast a quiet vote for presence.V. The Inner RainMaybe that’s what this season of my life is about — pausing so that I can turn knowing into doing through smaller, quieter acts. Not resolutions or reinventions, but gentle votes cast each day for rest and renewal.This morning, with my sore neck and the sky heavy with clouds, I realise something:Change isn’t a revelation but a slow practice — a conversation between knowing and doing.Maybe the rain I’m hoping for isn’t outside at all.Maybe it’s an inner rain — a pause, a cleansing, a chance to rest long enough for life to feel new again. Raininner-rain Mo Issa Previous Previous Beyond the Quick Fix: How I Found Depth After Self-Help Next Next The End of Thought? --- ### The End of Thought? Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/the-end-of-thought Description: This morning, I sit in stillness, coffee in hand, birds singing faintly in the background, with a pen and my journal. For a moment, aliveness flows through me. Writing, even these first lines, feels like oxygen. The End of Thought? 2 Oct Written By Mo Issa This morning, I sit in stillness, coffee in hand, birds singing faintly in the background, with a pen and my journal. For a moment, aliveness flows through me. Writing, even these first lines, feels like oxygen.And yet, I can’t escape the sense that I’ve been slipping. Too many mornings scrolling Instagram. Too often, I outsource my own words to AI. The pages of this journal stay thinner than they should. Am I becoming lazy—or simply losing the discipline of thought? The real danger isn’t that machines will outthink us. It’s that we will stop thinking ourselves. Two essays I recently read had a profound impact on me.James Marriott, in The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society, argues we are drifting into an age where scrolling, reels, and fragments replace the sustained act of reading. When literacy erodes, so too does imagination, critical debate, and even the foundations of democracy. A literate society isn’t just one that can read—it’s one that can reflect, pause, and think. Without that, we collapse into consumption and credulity.Derek Thompson, in The End of Thinking, sharpened the warning. The danger isn’t that AI will outthink us, but that we will stop thinking for ourselves. Writing, he reminds us, is not just expression but thinking made visible. To outsource it is to surrender the discipline of forming thought. He uses the metaphor of “time under tension”—just as a muscle strengthens under sustained strain, so does the mind under the strain of working through complexity. Remove that strain, and thought atrophies.Both pieces left me uneasy because I saw myself inside them. I’ve been reading less, writing less, thinking less. My mind marinates too often in the noise of WhatsApp threads, Padel groups, Instagram clips, and headlines of terrorism, fascism, and Middle East chaos. It leaves me more angry than alive.But reading “Great works” (literature and philosophy) again—after years of detours into “self-help”—has brought me back. It feels like recovering a muscle I almost forgot I had.I’d forgotten what my MFA tutor once told me: “Stay narrow and go deep.”And so, a new discipline every morning: with my phone out of reach, I read twenty pages of a philosophical or literary work, one interesting Substack article (not one that describes how to increase readership), and conclude with three longhand pages in my journal.Let the purity of thought come before the flood of noise—a ritual not of productivity, but of presence.To me, that is how I can never lose my thinking.Still, I circle a deeper unease. Why is it so hard to stick to the mundanity and simplicity of this practice that allows me to think?Why do I keep waiting for the “big project”—the podcast, the book, the one thing that will justify it all—when the truth is in the daily act?Camus would say that revolt is not about launching the perfect project, but about pushing the stone each day with dignity, even if it is futile. Perseverance is the philosophy of the absurd in practice.And yet, there’s another tension—what if my thinking is getting shallower? My time with friends, or superficial conversations at dinner, sometimes leaves me feeling thinner and less alive. I wonder: am I selling myself short, indulging in gossip and distraction? Even my journal can feel lightweight, circling themes of purpose but failing to dig.Simone Weil once described attention as “the purest form of generosity.” Perhaps true depth begins not with grand projects, but with learning to attend fully—to a page, a sentence, a silence, a good, deep conversation.So I remind myself: I can only become more interesting by immersing myself in more interesting things. Not headlines and reels, but the complex, luminous works of those who came before. Not another self-help cycle, but the strange, demanding voices of Hesse, Nietzsche, and Weil.If the mind is a muscle, then it strengthens under the strain of its complexity.So I return, again, to the page. To the discipline. To the small acts that may seem trivial but make me think.The podcast, the book—let them wait. First, I must live into the music of my soul, and that music is played in daily notes, not grand symphonies.And what matters most is this: to preserve my thinking against the erosion of noise.To resist the end of thought.To stay alive on the page. thoughtsend of thought Mo Issa Previous Previous Hoping for (Inner) Rain Next Next The Bottle and the Hammer --- ### The Bottle and the Hammer Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/the-bottle-and-the-hammer Description: This morning, I wrote by hand. No keyboard. No AI. Just me, a pen, and the raw silence of the page. It felt slow, painfully so. My hand cramped after twenty minutes. More than once, I was tempted to stop and let ChatGPT “make it better.” The Bottle and the Hammer 12 Aug Written By Mo Issa This morning, I wrote by hand. No keyboard. No AI. Just me, a pen, and the raw silence of the page. It felt slow, painfully so. My hand cramped after twenty minutes. More than once, I was tempted to stop and let ChatGPT “make it better.”But I didn’t.I’ve gotten used to speed. To asking, searching, clicking, and receiving. Recently, I’ve leaned too heavily on AI. Yes, it’s helped me craft sharp, clean articles—some better than what I might have written myself.But I’ve lost something in the process. The pause. The struggle. The grit of getting stuck mid-sentence and wrestling my way forward.Don’t get me wrong—tools help. But something’s missing when it’s too easy.For me, the outcome is immaterial. What matters is the process. And something in me knows—has always known—that the only true joy is found in doing things the hard way. No shortcuts. No dopamine-fed rushes.Just the long road, the quiet road. A meaningful life, a fulfilled life, is earned through resistance.“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” — NietzscheI keep reminding myself that I write not to perform, but to understand. To strip myself bare. And my “how” must surely be a return to writing without crutches or quick fixes—and, most importantly, to suffer a bit through it all. Bukowski: The Walk Through the Fire“What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.” — BukowskiBukowski knew the fire well. He bathed in alcohol, sex, and chaos—not to feel alive, but to numb the gnawing emptiness. Yet when he wrote, it wasn’t performative. It was blood. He faced his demons not in his habits, but in his poetry.He failed in life, and yet helped (and still helps me every day) to make sense of the world around us.In Post Office, Bukowski wrote:“I had to get out of bed, I had to get dressed, I had to eat. It was always the same thing. The same thing all over again. Then I had to go to work. And there were people. It was the worst of all. The people. It wasn’t that I hated them. I just didn’t like them. I didn’t want to be around them. I wanted to be alone. I wanted to get away from everything. But I couldn’t.”Here, he’s describing more than hangovers and dead-end jobs. He’s naming the spiritual exhaustion of modern life. The quiet hell of repetition. The need for something other, but not knowing what, or how to wait for it. Perhaps, explaining why we sometimes need a drink, a cigar, or a 30-minute doom scroll on Instagram.Where Bukowski numbs the ache, Nietzsche amplifies it—wants you to burn in it until you become something else. Nietzsche: The Fire Without the FixNietzsche had his own agony, but he rejected short fixes outright. He saw them as soul-eroding distractions. For him, the only worthy life was one of heroic suffering, chosen struggle, and radical self-overcoming.In The Gay Science, he writes:“For believe me: the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is—to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge!”Nietzsche doesn’t drink to forget. He climbs mountains to remember. And in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he urges:“You say the good cause justifies even war? I say to you: the good war sanctifies every cause. War and courage have done more great things than love of the neighbor. Not your pity but your bravery has saved the unfortunate.”There’s no room for pity or comfort here. Nietzsche wants you to forge meaning, not flee into pleasures. He despised mediocrity—the kind that makes peace with boredom through cheap thrills. The Tension: Numb or TranscendBukowski represents the part of us that’s tired of pretending—tired of lofty goals, tired of spiritual pep talks. He takes the hit, lights a smoke, and scribbles his lines anyway.Nietzsche demands we become gods—not through pleasure, but through fire.The one sits at a bar, the other climbs a peak. But both are alone. Both are burning. Both are trying to live without illusions.So, which are you today?The one who reaches for the bottle—or the one who grips the hammer?I’d want to write by hand. Slowly. Imperfectly. To suffer in my writing.But I’d also like a Davidoff Nicaragua Toro cigar and a Macallan 12-year-old Double Cask whiskey every now and then to go with my suffering. bottlehammer Mo Issa Previous Previous The End of Thought? Next Next On Idleness, Purpose, and the Weight of Nothing --- ### On Idleness, Purpose, and the Weight of Nothing Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/on-idleness-purpose-and-the-weight-of-nothing Description: Michel de Montaigne, in his essay Of Idleness, describes what happens when the mind is given freedom without direction. Hoping for peace, he instead found monsters. On Idleness, Purpose, and the Weight of Nothing 5 Aug Written By Mo Issa I’ve decided to take the day off.It’s a Wednesday, right in the middle of the workweek. I’ve carved it out just for myself—no meetings, no emails, no distractions. Just writing. A full day to dive deep, to explore my mind, to finally put in the hours I’ve been craving. To not just write, but to research myself. To dig.I start the day right. My morning ritual unfolds as planned: meditation, reading, journaling, gym, then an ice bath to sharpen the senses.I return to my desk, ready. Focused. Open.I sit in front of the laptop. I wait.Nothing.No idea comes. No subject sticks. I stare. I scroll.I return to the blank page.If I wrote about politics, I could write about yesterday’s headlines. If I were an orchid enthusiast, I could research soil types or flowering cycles. But I don’t have that kind of specificity. My writing is more memoir than manual. It draws from my lived experience, from whatever current is running beneath the surface.But lately, there’s no current. Or at least, no clear direction. The thread is missing.And in that moment—on a day I gifted to myself—I feel it again. That old ache. The aimlessness. The lack of direction. Not just in writing, but in life.My work life, too, feels mapped out. I’ve been running the same company for nearly three decades. I know its rhythms, its struggles, its triumphs. But it feels like I’m circling the same ground. Nothing new grows. Nothing challenges or excites.And when I try to step away, to create space, I expect inspiration. Instead, I meet… nothing.Michel de Montaigne, in his essay Of Idleness, describes what happens when the mind is given freedom without direction. Hoping for peace, he instead found monsters.“I found that my mind, instead of finding repose… gave itself more trouble than ever. It brought forth so many chimeras and fantastic monsters, so irregular and without design, that, in order to contemplate their foolishness and strangeness at my leisure, I began to write them down.”He had stepped back from public life, expecting serenity. Instead, his unoccupied mind turned chaotic. And so he began to write—not from clarity, but from confusion. Not from purpose, but from wandering.He also wrote:“The soul that has no fixed goal loses itself; for, as they say, to be everywhere is to be nowhere.”That line pierces through me. Because that’s where I find myself—nowhere.Drifting between what I used to do and what I might one day find. My business doesn’t need me the way it used to. My writing lacks a defined thread. I keep showing up, but I don’t know what for.And maybe that’s the invitation hidden in the fog. To stop looking for the perfect subject. To stop demanding clarity before I begin. Yes, I’m soothed that someone like Montaigne also goes through the same feelings as I do. But that is not enough.Maybe, like Montaigne, I need to write down the chimaeras. To meet the monsters. To track the drift. And in doing so, allow a new thread to emerge—not from having a purpose, but from honestly naming its absence.So here I am, again, facing the laptop. Empty. But not entirely.There’s something forming in the fog.Maybe that’s where it always begins. On Idleness, Purpose, and the Weight of Nothingidlenesspurposeweightnothing Mo Issa Previous Previous The Bottle and the Hammer Next Next The Deception of Achievement and the Quiet Grace of Fulfilment --- ### The Deception of Achievement and the Quiet Grace of Fulfilment Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/deception-of-achievement Description: Serotonin is associated with contentment, stability, connection, and self-worth. It’s not a spike—it’s a baseline. You feel it when you do meaningful work, when you spend time with loved ones, when you live in alignment with your values. The Deception of Achievement and the Quiet Grace of Fulfilment 29 Jul Written By Mo Issa “Achievement is no guarantee of inner peace. In fact, it often disturbs it.” — Thomas Merton Launch day. The Midlife Shift—my book, my baby—was finally out in the world.After months of writing, editing, doubting, and dreaming, I was ready. On the surface, the goal was simple: to hit No. 1 on Amazon in an obscure category, such as “Humanism Philosophy,” as advised by a marketing consultant.That’s how you sell books, he told me, but of course, behind that, something deeper was stirring—a longing to be seen, to matter, to feel fulfilled.So I worked that launch like a man possessed. I messaged every contact in my phone, emailed everyone I knew, and posted on every platform I could. All I needed was to sell around 200 copies under a dollar to hit the top.And it worked.A few days later, the notification came: “#1 Bestseller – Humanism Philosophy.”I was ecstatic.For about ten minutes.Then… nothing. A strange silence. An anticlimax. A whispering question inside: Was that it?True, I achieved what I’d wanted, but was I truly fulfilled? The rush at first soon dissipated, leaving me feeling empty.The Dopamine TrapWhat I experienced was dopamine in action.Dopamine is often misunderstood as the “pleasure” chemical. In reality, it’s the “I want more (but will never be satisfied)” chemical. It drives us toward the goal. It gets us hungry, obsessed, and energised. But once we actually get the thing?The thrill vanishes quickly.This is why we can chase goals for months or years, only to feel deflated after achieving them. The next morning, we’re already asking: What’s next?It’s not our fault. It’s biology. Dopamine is designed to keep us moving, not to make us whole.Like drinking saltwater when you’re thirsty—stimulating, but never satisfying.The Serotonin ShiftWhile dopamine fuels the chase, serotonin offers something subtler: peace.Serotonin is associated with contentment, stability, connection, and self-worth. It’s not a spike—it’s a baseline. You feel it when you do meaningful work, when you spend time with loved ones, when you live in alignment with your values.It doesn’t scream. It whispers.Looking back, the real joy I felt during the book project wasn’t in the launch or the bestseller title. It was in the process—the morning writing sessions, the edits that finally made sense, the flow state I found when the words poured out effortlessly.That was serotonin.That was fulfilment.Adam Smith and the Beautiful LieEven Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, saw through this.In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he wrote that much of our ambition is driven by a kind of illusion—that wealth and recognition will finally make us happy. He called it a “deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind.”In simpler terms, we’re tricked into striving so that the machine of society keeps running.And it works—at least on the surface.But as individuals, that trick can leave us hollow. We chase after titles, trophies, money, and milestones, only to find that none of it quiets the deeper restlessness inside.Because fulfilment isn’t something you can buy, win, or measure.It’s something you become.The Process Is the PointWe’re taught to fixate on the outcome—the book deal, the bestseller list, the dream job, the successful launch.However, the truth is that fulfilment lives in the process.In the doing. In the showing up.What really nourishes us isn’t the reward—it’s the rhythm. Waking up and doing work that matters to us. Being in flow. Following a craft. Building something day by day, even when no one’s watching.That’s where we grow. That’s where we come alive.So What Do We Do With This?We stop mistaking the high for the whole.We stop chasing the next hit and start cultivating a life of meaningful repetition.We ask different questions—not “What do I want to achieve?” but “What do I want to keep doing every day, even if no one claps?”We stop obsessing over dopamine and start paying attention to serotonin.We learn that fulfilment is not a finish line. It’s a way of walking.Looking back, I’m still proud of hitting No.1.But that hollow feeling afterwards showed me that no achievement—no matter how shiny—can replace the quiet satisfaction of living a life that feels aligned. Of doing the work I love. Of returning, again and again, to the process that grounds me.Fulfilment isn’t found at the top. It’s found in the return.To the desk. To the page. To the work.And maybe, to yourself. The Deception of Achievement and the Quiet Grace of Fulfilmentdeceptionachievementquietgracefulfilment Mo Issa Previous Previous On Idleness, Purpose, and the Weight of Nothing Next Next Why Are Mondays So Hard --- ### Why Are Mondays So Hard Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/mondays-so-hard Description: The same corridor, the same forced smile to the receptionist, the same tug of heaviness in my chest. The air smells of my office having just been cleaned, and the first whirring of the air conditioner. The light overhead is too white, too harsh. Why Are Mondays So Hard 7 Jul Written By Mo Issa “Sometimes, carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement.” — Albert Camus It’s Monday Again.I arrive at the office at 8:50 a.m.—a bit late or maybe not.The same corridor, the same forced smile to the receptionist, the same tug of heaviness in my chest. The air smells of my office having just been cleaned, and the first whirring of the air conditioner. The light overhead is too white, too harsh.The office feels like a morgue of motion. Papers waiting, emails blinking, tasks lined up like body tags. I sit down in the chair that knows my back too well, the seat I’ve warmed for thirty years, and I look at the desk that knows all my moods. I open my laptop. Sales are still down. Nothing has changed over the weekend, as if the figures, like the staff, are waiting for someone else to take responsibility.Still no urgency. Still no one from the team is stepping up—still no consequence.And I feel it again: that familiar heat behind my ribs. Not rage exactly—more like a quiet, corrosive resentment. Not at them. Not anymore.At me.Because I built this, I allowed it. I tolerated the placidity, the polite excuses, the mediocrity.I built this system, and now it imprisons me.No, not a system. A tomb.But tombs are for the dead. And I’m still here. So maybe it’s worse than a tomb. Perhaps it’s a museum—a slow, dull exhibit of a man who once believed in movement and fire. Fridays are easier. On Fridays, there’s possibility. A sense that the weekend might allow something different—a match of padel, a walk on empty roads, a few quiet hours by the pool, or dinner with friends.But Mondays? I feel a quiet collapse. Not of things falling apart—but of meaning itself going silent.Mondays are betrayal. A reminder that I am not free. That I must pick up the yoke again. That I must return to my self-made dungeon, at the bottom of a building filled with ghosts of energy that once were.Today I asked myself, again: Why is Monday so hard?It’s not the work. I’ve done harder work. It’s not the people—I’ve had more difficult teams. It’s the fact that I can no longer pretend I’m inspired. That whatever magic kept me going—fear, ambition, novelty—it’s evaporated.And so I return to Camus:“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”But I read that now and wonder—what if I’ve lived most of my life in summer?What if the sun were money, luxury, status, leadership, the dopamine of growth?And now?Now the leaves are falling. The air is cold. My office echoes more than it used to.I am in winter.And I’m still looking for the invincible part. I walked to the window and stared down at two junior staff members standing by the gate, laughing. I watched the curve of their shoulders, the way their hands animated their story, and how their heads tilted back in real laughter.They are not burdened by the weight of purpose.They are not haunted by the emptiness of achievement.I envied them.But even envy felt too sharp a word. I think what I felt was longing.A longing to return to that unthinking stage of life, when laughter wasn’t weighed down by everything it had to rise above.Rumi came to mind:“Don’t get lost in your pain. Know that one day your pain will become your cure.”I wonder what Rumi would have said to me this morning.Would he have smiled and said, Brother, go dance barefoot in the street?Would he have sat beside me and poured tea and waited, silent, until I spoke?Instead, I opened my journal and wrote one sentence:“Revolt, yes. But how does one revolt when numb?”Because numbness is not the absence of pain.It is the pain buried so deep that even anger can’t find it.It is winter turned inward. I wrote this not because I have answers—but because I believe in documenting the moments when meaning slips away, so that when it returns, we recognize it more clearly.Camus taught that revolt is the beginning of freedom.And today, writing this felt like a kind of revolt. A refusal to sink into numbness.A refusal to let Mondays turn me to stone.If you’re feeling the same—whether in your office, your home, or your heart—know that you’re not alone. Perhaps on some Mondays, all we need is to pause.To name the ache. And to light a small candle in the dark. Share With MeWhat’s your “Monday”?What’s the place or time in your week when you feel most distant from yourself?Leave a comment—I read everything. mondayswhy are mondays so hardhard Mo Issa Previous Previous The Deception of Achievement and the Quiet Grace of Fulfilment Next Next I’m Back — and Writing Under a New Name --- ### I’m Back — and Writing Under a New Name Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/back-and-writing Description: After a few months of silence, I’m writing again. Not for the algorithm. Not for applause. But because I must. I’m Back — and Writing Under a New Name 1 Jul Written By Mo Issa “If you return to the place where your soul first sang, you’ll hear the echo waiting.” — Unknown / adapted After a few months of silence, I’m writing again.Not for the algorithm. Not for applause.But because I must.If you’ve been here before, you know I’ve wrestled with this calling for years. Why I keep writing even when it pays nothing wasn’t just a confession—it was an act of survival.And then I stopped.What happened?Life. Exhaustion. A slow-burning disconnect between the man I am and the life I’ve built.I wrote about it in The Biggest Fight of My Life, and that title wasn’t metaphor. It was personal.That fight wasn’t about work or money or success.It was about staying in touch with my spirit, my voice, my why.And now I return—to write, yes.But also to reclaim.Why the New Name?I’m now writing under a new name:In Search of Mo(re)It’s a play on my name—Mo—but also a gesture toward the inner search. For meaning. For connection. For that unnamed longing that keeps pulling me back to the page.This newsletter is part diary, part meditation, part soul-work. I write to make sense of the world—and myself—in it.Who I Am (Again)I’m a 57-year-old man trying to run a company, stay in good health so I can trek trails in my 80s, support my family, and grapple with questions that don’t have easy answers.I’ve built a life, and still, some mornings I wake up wondering what it’s all for.I’ve read the mystics. Sat with the Stoics. Devoured Gibran, Hesse, Hemingway and Bukowski.And yet I’m still searching.This is a space where I lay that search bare.Where I confess what I’m learning—and unlearning—about finding a life’s cohesive philosophy, being human, compassion, connection, ageing, creativity, the world and the contradictions in all of it.I write as someone who has endured the grind, made a living, and met targets.And still wants more.But not more of the same. But rather,More honesty.More clarity.More joy.More life.What to ExpectShort essays. Quiet confessions. Honest questions. Occasional poetry.No hacks. No hustle. No hype.Just a man trying to write his way through it.If any of that resonates—welcome.Not to a brand or a lifestyle.But to a conversation.This is not a blueprint. It’s a voice.This is not a product. It’s a pulse.Thanks for being here. And for searching—with me.—MoIn Search of Mo(re) i am backwritingnew name Mo Issa Previous Previous Why Are Mondays So Hard Next Next Breaking Free from the Performance Trap --- ### Breaking Free from the Performance Trap Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/breaking-free-from-the-performance-trap Description: The new year didn't bring the usual rush of excitement or fresh beginnings. Instead, it feels like an extension of last year—momentum without inspiration, movement without clarity. Like walking through a persistent fog, each step forward requires more effort than it should. Breaking Free from the Performance Trap 13 Feb Written By Mo Issa The new year didn't bring the usual rush of excitement or fresh beginnings.Instead, it feels like an extension of last year—momentum without inspiration, movement without clarity. Like walking through a persistent fog, each step forward requires more effort than it should.There's a sense of stagnation, a repetitive loop of work, gym, and obligations. The rhythms of life continue, but something feels off.It's not burnout, not exactly. It's more like a subtle, creeping question: Why does this take so much effort?I've been trying to balance two core aspects of my identity for years. The entrepreneur in me needs to build and grow the company, focusing on metrics, strategy, and execution. Then there's the writer, teacher, and creative, yearning for deep, meaningful expression.Neither has been fully nurtured, leaving me suspended in a constant state of tension.Discipline and self-control push me forward, yet there's a nagging feeling that maintaining consistency shouldn't always feel like a fight.I wake up at 5:30 to work out. I lead my company by having regular meetings, following up on OKRs, and having hard conversations. I maintain a healthy lifestyle and block six hours weekly for writing. These aren't just tasks—they're expressions of who I am.So why do I need so much discipline to keep doing things that are supposedly part of my identity?The fog grows thickest when I sit down to write.The other day, I spent forty minutes staring at a blank screen. Every attempt to start was overwhelmed by expectations—not just to write, but to create something extraordinary.I need to produce the most-read essay on Substack, as if anything less would be failure. There's no middle ground when I’m writing and expressing my soul, and everything must be perfect.However, regarding my company, family, and exercise, I’ve learned to express myself without needing to be perfect.I’m conflicted as I’ve written many times before.Would I be more content if I followed one path? Either writing or entrepreneurship? But I can’t quit my company. Not now, anyway. And when I neglect my writing, I feel disconnected from myself.Both must continue.As I dug deeper, the problem I found was that my soul’s work—writing—became tied to performance—to numbers, metrics, and growth strategies. The fear of losing subscribers mirrors the fear of losing business traction.This pattern appears everywhere: the constant need to produce, to prove myself. I'm simply using perfectionism as a shield against vulnerability.Yes, I need numbers for my business, but surely not for my writing.Yet beneath this fog, I sense something shifting.Perhaps I'm nearing a breakthrough—reaching the point where external validation loses its grip. Maybe I'm learning to trust myself more. But trust in what, exactly?What if my writing could exist purely as a soul practice, detached from business goals? What if I allowed myself to write quietly, in my journal, for no one but me? The tension between writing for personal fulfillment and an audience doesn't have to be resolved—it can be acknowledged and embraced.Exhaustion comes from constantly questioning, from looking outward for certainty instead of inward for conviction. This restlessness, this feeling of being unmoored, stems from waiting for someone else to validate my choices.However, I come alive when I take my passions seriously and decide what sustains me deserves careful attention. The answer isn't outside—it's in fully committing to what fuels me, trusting that what I love is enough.The fog begins to lift when I embrace both aspects of my journey:I choose to pour my energy into growing my company with renewed passion, recapturing the curiosity and innovation that drove me when I first started. I’d need all the metrics here to analyse and readjust for growth.This isn't about "having to" do it; it's about acknowledging that this work is an integral part of who I am.Simultaneously, I commit to writing from my innermost thoughts, free from the pressure to impress or instruct. There is no need to connect every insight to ancient philosophy or polish every sentence perfectly. I want to express myself honestly, flowing from experience to this newsletter/essay on Substack.As the fog clears, I realise that this tension—between entrepreneurship and creativity, between external achievement and internal truth—is not something to resolve but to harness.In embracing both, I might find my clearest path forward. perfomancebreaking freeperformace traptrap Mo Issa Previous Previous I’m Back — and Writing Under a New Name Next Next Embracing Change: How Small Rituals Can Transform Your Life --- ### Embracing Change: How Small Rituals Can Transform Your Life Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/embracing-change Description: For me, it all started with small daily rituals. Every morning, before work, I’d spend an hour reading, meditating, and journaling. These activities became the foundation of my transformation. At first, I didn’t need to see a therapist; the journaling itself helped me become more self-aware. Embracing Change: How Small Rituals Can Transform Your Life 6 Feb Written By Mo Issa Accepting change and the total shift that comes with it can be quite an experience, especially when it seems like there’s so much to figure out.We’re creatures of comfort, and it’s hard to accept change.Building habits or rituals is key to fostering and manifesting change in our lives. I know everyone’s tired of hearing about habits—there are countless books, from Atomic Habits to Tiny Habits, but it seems everyone’s preaching the same thing.But the truth is, there is no quick fix.For me, it all started with small daily rituals. Every morning, before work, I’d spend an hour reading, meditating, and journaling. These activities became the foundation of my transformation. At first, I didn’t need to see a therapist; the journaling itself helped me become more self-aware.Awareness is the crucial first step toward change, but it doesn’t end there. The next step is to take action. If you don’t act, life will inevitably push you toward change, and you might be unprepared for it.It wasn’t always a walk in the park when I started this journey. Some habits, like reading, came naturally since I craved knowledge, but others were a struggle. The key was making habits small and manageable with consistency. For instance, I began with five instead of meditating for 20 minutes.Understanding the "why" behind a habit also helps. Once I understood the purpose of my habits, it became easier to integrate into my life.We have little time for reflection due to the relentless distractions of modern life. Unlike when I was younger, we're now bombarded with information 24/7. That's why it's crucial to be intentional about building habits that help us block out distractions and refocus our minds. It won’t happen by accident.Last year, when the conflict in the Middle East escalated, I found myself glued to X (formerly Twitter), refreshing the feed for updates. What started as a quick check turned into hours of mindless scrolling—I caught myself in the trap.Our attention is constantly contested, and if we don't act, we risk losing control over its direction.We’re at a tipping point, and I believe that, in time, we’ll all need some form of intervention to regain control over our minds. It’s not easy, but it’s also urgent.Let’s start building these small habits as they become bridges to our higher selves. embraing changeritualstransformsmall ritualtransform your life Mo Issa Previous Previous Breaking Free from the Performance Trap Next Next Thinking in the Age of Artificial Intelligence --- ### Thinking in the Age of Artificial Intelligence Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/age-of-artificial-intelligence Description: I started thinking about how AI is already trespassing on every corner of my life. It helped me create my new 30-minute daily strength routine, edit and polish my essays, and assist me at work, analyzing Google Analytics to improve my marketing team’s SEO activities. It even helped me find good restaurants in London when I was there during the Christmas holidays. Thinking in the Age of Artificial Intelligence 30 Jan Written By Mo Issa A Paul Graham inspired essayThis morning, I read an essay titled “Writes and Write-Nots.”1 Immediately after finishing it, I lit a cigar and reflected for some time.Paul Graham always does that to me.I started thinking about how AI is already trespassing on every corner of my life. It helped me create my new 30-minute daily strength routine, edit and polish my essays, and assist me at work, analyzing Google Analytics to improve my marketing team’s SEO activities. It even helped me find good restaurants in London when I was there during the Christmas holidays.Best of all, it has become a brainstorming partner. I’ve finally found something or someone with whom I can mentally spar every day.Had AI taken over my life without me knowing it? Was it quietly reshaping how I think, feel, and exist in the world?AI is undeniably altering the landscape of work, creativity, and thought. Writing, for example, is undergoing a profound transformation. Jobs that rely on the written word—crafting emails, professional letters, CVs, legal briefs, or even medical documentation—are increasingly within AI’s reach.For many, this feels like a loss.As Leslie Lamport once said, “If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.”So, could AI think and write on our behalf? I don’t think so, or I don’t understand how it could do so.AI can be both a teacher and a research assistant, serving as a catalyst. It prompts me to explore new perspectives and provides tools to articulate them better.But the origin of my ideas, the spark of insight—that is deeply personal and unreplicable by machines.This idea echoes Graham’s brilliant metaphor about strength. In pre-industrial times, most people’s jobs made them physically strong. If you want to be strong today, you go to the gym. Strength is no longer a byproduct of daily life; it’s a choice.The same will be true of intellectual and creative pursuits in the age of AI. Thinking, writing, and creating will remain possible—even essential—but only for those who actively choose to engage in them.For me, AI is a partner, not a replacement. It brainstorms with me, sharpens my thoughts, and polishes my words. But it does not think for me.My thoughts are shaped by my experiences, memories, and emotional landscape. AI lacks these foundational elements. It can simulate empathy or mimic human creativity but cannot truly feel or imagine.The joy of discovery, the weight of doubt, the beauty of serendipity—these are uniquely human experiences.And yet, there’s a warning here. The more we rely on AI, the easier it becomes to outsource not just labour but thought itself. It’s tempting to let the machine do the heavy lifting, accept its suggestions uncritically, and lose the discipline of wrestling with difficult questions.But that’s a choice, not a fate we’re doomed to. Just as I choose to write to clarify my thinking, I must choose to think deeply in the first place.AI does not define me. The essence of who I am—the way I think, feel, and exist in the world—remains firmly rooted in my humanity. AI is a powerful tool, but it is just that: a tool.As Paul Graham suggests, the challenge is to use it wisely, to allow it to enhance rather than diminish our intellectual and creative lives.Ultimately, I trust my reflections, feelings, and sense of being, which all contribute to my essence.That essence lies in my choice to engage, wrestle with ideas, and create meaning. As long as I make that choice, I remain fully, unapologetically human.Then again, I might regret writing this essay a few years (or months) down the road. Link to Paul Graham's Essay artificial intelligenceaiartificialintelligenceage of artificial intelligence Mo Issa Previous Previous Embracing Change: How Small Rituals Can Transform Your Life Next Next The Art of Being: Reflections on a Christmas Break With Family --- ### The Art of Being: Reflections on a Christmas Break With Family Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/the-art-of-being Description: Over the Christmas break, I found myself in London, surrounded by family. It was a rare gathering—my daughter flying in from New York, my son already in London, my sister, my brother and his family, and even my niece with her newborn. The Art of Being: Reflections on a Christmas Break With Family 16 Jan Written By Mo Issa Over the Christmas break, I found myself in London, surrounded by family. It was a rare gathering—my daughter flying in from New York, my son already in London, my sister, my brother and his family, and even my niece with her newborn.I’d promised myself that despite my introverted nature and love of solitude, I would be the person everyone wanted to see: fun, engaging, and present. But as the days unfolded, the complete opposite happened. It was a familiar pattern, one that mirrored so many previous trips.London was bustling, cold, and full of queues. The sheer size of our group made every outing an exercise in logistics, which chipped away at my patience. I became a version of myself I dislike—irritated, robotic, and eventually explosive.All my mindfulness work seemed to crumble under these triggers. The breaking point came on one of the last days.It was freezing, and I wanted to spend the whole day with my two kids. After wandering the streets, unable to find a restaurant, I grew agitated and, in my frustration, rudely treated my daughter. The very behaviours I had promised to avoid came rushing back.In the days since, I’ve reflected deeply on why I fell victim to this cycle again and what it means for the year ahead. I realised that awareness is not enough. While I could see the triggers unfolding in real time, I lacked the tools to escape the spiral.For 2025, I’ve decided to shift my focus from doing to being.This isn’t about abandoning goals but prioritising who I want to become over what I want to achieve. It’s about cultivating presence, mindfulness, and authenticity—qualities often lost in the chase for accomplishments.Cultivating PresencePresence is more than just being physically there; it’s about genuinely inhabiting the moment. During the Christmas break, I noticed how quickly I became lost in my thoughts and frustrations, detached from the people and experiences around me.Moving forward, I want to anchor myself in the present through mindfulness practices like meditation and small, intentional moments. A few deep breaths during tense situations, a brief pause to express gratitude, or even stepping outside for fresh air can gently remind me to stay grounded.Lowering ExpectationsMuch of my stress during the trip stemmed from unspoken expectations—of myself, my family, and the environment. I wanted everything to go smoothly, to create picture-perfect memories.But the reality of life is often far messier.By setting fewer, more realistic priorities and embracing imperfection, I want to create space for joy and spontaneity. Instead of trying to attend every family outing, I can plan a few meaningful moments that allow for deeper connections.Expressing My NeedsOne of the most significant lessons from this experience is the importance of open communication. My tendency to suppress my feelings—to avoid conflict or seem selfish—only fuels resentment and guilt.In the future, I want to practice articulating my needs with kindness and honesty. It’s okay to say, “I need a few hours alone to recharge,” or “I’m feeling overwhelmed and need some time to process.” These small acts of vulnerability can foster understanding and help me show up as my best self.Transforming Old PatternsThe agitation I felt in London wasn’t just about the cold or the queues; it was a resurfacing of old patterns tied to my childhood. When I’m triggered, my body often goes into survival mode, reacting as it did when I was ten years old seeking help navigating a new environment.Recognising this is the first step. The next is learning to soothe myself in those moments—through movement, breathwork, or even journaling—so I can respond rather than react.Prioritising Depth Over QuantityOne of the greatest gifts I can give myself and others is my undivided attention. Instead of spreading myself thin across countless commitments, I want to focus on the relationships and activities that truly matter. Whether it’s a quiet conversation with my daughter, a walk with my son, or a shared meal with my sister, these moments of genuine connection are where fulfilment lies.Redefining FulfillmentOur culture glorifies busyness and achievement, often at the expense of presence and peace. But I’ve learned that lasting fulfilment comes not from checking off milestones but from aligning with my higher self.It’s about celebrating simplicity—a warm cup of tea, a shared laugh, or a quiet moment of reflection—and finding joy in life’s small, peaceful moments.Looking ahead, I’m committed to making 2025 a year of transformation. Not one measured by external achievements but by the depth of presence, connection, and peace I cultivate.I want to be okay with not having all the answers, stepping back from the race and embracing life as a journey rather than a destination.If I can do that, perhaps the next family gathering will feel less like a test and more like an opportunity to be my truest self—present, authentic, and aligned with the person I aspire to become. reflectionchristmasbreak with familybreakfamilybeingart of being Mo Issa Previous Previous Thinking in the Age of Artificial Intelligence Next Next Beyond Goals: How to Make 2025 Truly Count(Part one) --- ### Beyond Goals: How to Make 2025 Truly Count(Part one) Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/how-to-make-2025 Description: A few days before and after the new year, what would make 2025 a great year was playing on my mind. Then Rumi’s ‘The Breeze at Dawn’ poem gently poked me. Beyond Goals: How to Make 2025 Truly Count(Part one) 9 Jan Written By Mo Issa “The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.Don’t go back to sleep.You must ask for what you really want.Don’t go back to sleep.People are going back and forthacross the doorsillwhere the two worlds touch.The door is round and open.Don’t go back to sleep.”I also asked ChatGPT’s help :“One thing that could make the upcoming year fulfilling for you is crafting and committing to a purpose-driven project that aligns with your love for writing and deep thinking. Perhaps starting a novel would let you merge your intellectual and creative passions into something meaningful.”So, yes, I plan to start and finish the first draft of a book I have in mind.But I also want to win at the substack game, add some muscle to my ageing body, and increase my company’s bottom line.But now that I’ve written them down, they don’t feel sexy. They are the same ones I’ve been chasing with mixed results over the past three years.These have led me to a striving mentality, where I either get overwhelmed, freeze, and stop chasing the goals or cast them aside after accomplishing them and look for a newer challenge without appreciating the achievement.Aristotle’s ParadoxThe great philosopher Aristotle explained this dilemma by stating that two main categories of activities make life meaningful: Telic and Atelic.Telic comes from the Greek word Telos, which means purpose, goal, or end—for example, running a marathon, achieving X amount in sales, or writing a book.However, the problem with telic activities is that they pose a paradox. When we fail, we are dissatisfied. Our happiness is short-lived when we accomplish the end, and we immediately start looking for a new goal.The excitement of completing a book wears off after a few weeks. Running a half marathon will not suffice, and we aim for the full marathon next, or hitting a sales target means we need to raise the next one. It just never stops.The meaning we get from Telic activities cannot be sustained. Thus, we are always looking for what’s next—our fulfilment will always lie in the future or the past.Postponing our happiness is no way to live—The more we continually strive towards success, accomplishments and goals, the more miserable we feel.The Atelic class of activities are those done with no goal in mind. They are done for their own sake. The activity is its own reward. They keep us grounded in the present. These could include taking walks, cooking, and spending time with family and friends.Atelic activities include big concepts like being a good parent, dedicating our lives to a specific cause, or aiming to be a better writer. These are not exhaustible; they remain unfinished and a continual source of joy throughout our lives. Thus, there is no emptiness felt.We can’t build our life around telic activities as we do with relationships and careers. To have more contentment and harmony in our lives, we should incorporate more Atelic activities that are only means without an end.How To Make Goals More SexyThe philosopher Robert M. Pirsig wrote, “It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top.” While goals give structure and direction, it is the day-to-day act of climbing—the system—that makes life meaningful. By adopting this approach, we can find contentment not in the elusive “there” but in the abundant “here.”The best way to feel the buzz of a goal and retain the contentment with our accomplishments is to align the telic goal with atelic activity.Let me rewrite my goals in that manner:Goal 1My goal is to finish the first draft of a book by November 11th, 2025. That means I’d need to write for at least 6-8 hours weekly or approximately an hour daily. The thought of doing so gives me joy and inner peace. Completing the book is the telic act, and the writing process becomes the atelic activity.Goal 2Add more muscle mass and reach a body fat composition of 15% and not 19%(as of now) by the end of the year. This means I will spend at least ten hours a week between strength training, walking and playing Padel. Activities that I genuinely enjoy.Goal 3To reach 10k free subscribers with Substack. This is a tough one, as I know doing so means writing good content and engaging with other writers often. Again, this means at least another ten hours between writing and engagement a week. There are no shortcuts, and it is very time-consuming.Goal 4After last year's economic challenges and missed sales targets, the system we implemented—focusing on building relationships—created a foundation of leads and opportunities that set us up for future success. The company's numbers can only improve by continuing that momentum and allowing the team to do the heavy lifting.As you consider your resolutions for 2025, I would like you to think beyond the end result. Instead of asking, “What do I want to achieve?” ask, “What do I want to do more of?”Build your goals around processes that bring joy, growth, and connection. Love hiking? Commit to weekly trails rather than conquering a specific summit. Passionate about music? Make it a habit to play your instrument daily rather than focusing on a recital.Let’s make 2025 a year where we savour the walk, not just the destination.Here’s to a year of meaningful processes and unexpected joys.Next week, I will tackle the ‘being’ goal rather than the ‘doing’ most of us are fixated on. Who do you want to be? How will you show up? Will you stop being a people-pleaser? Or will you continue being a controlling, anxious freak? beyond goalsgoals20252025 goals Mo Issa Previous Previous The Art of Being: Reflections on a Christmas Break With Family Next Next A Year in Words: My Six Most Memorable Posts of 2024 --- ### A Year in Words: My Six Most Memorable Posts of 2024 Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/six-most-memorable-posts-of-2024 Description: Writing has always been more than words on a page—it’s a way to connect, inspire, and make sense of the world around me. My blog has become a canvas for exploration, creativity, and expression this year. A Year in Words: My Six Most Memorable Posts of 2024 26 Dec Written By Mo Issa Writing has always been more than words on a page—it’s a way to connect, inspire, and make sense of the world around me. My blog has become a canvas for exploration, creativity, and expression this year.As the year draws closer, it’s time to reflect on the stories and ideas I’ve shared over the past year. I’m grateful for every moment you spent reading, sharing, and engaging with it.I’ve selected six standout posts from the past year that resonated deeply, sparked the most discussions, or marked pivotal moments in my creative growth to celebrate the journey.Whether you’re discovering these for the first time or revisiting old favourites, each represents a milestone in my writing journey.Here’s to reliving the highlights together: "Wiser, Not Older: The Journey of Self-Awareness" by Mo IssaKnow Thyself As Early As You CanRead on Substack Lost in Distraction.Languishing in Life. by Mo IssaAre the smartest brains in history hijacking our attention?Read on Substack I Want More Zen in My Life by Mo IssaEquanimity, Inner Peace and consistent practiceRead on Substack I Want More Zen in My Life by Mo IssaEquanimity, Inner Peace and consistent practiceRead on Substack How I'm Struggling to Balance Nietzsche's Power with Rumi's Love by Mo Issathe conflict between my competitive nature and my desire for inner peaceRead on Substack The Biggest Fight of My Life by Mo IssaWhy I Keep Thinking That I Should Quit WritingRead on Substack memorable Mo Issa Previous Previous Beyond Goals: How to Make 2025 Truly Count(Part one) Next Next The Tao of Enough --- ### The Tao of Enough Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/the-tao-of-enough Description: I’m up at 5 am, and before I’ve even had my coffee, my mind is buzzing, and my heart is racing. Not only am I travelling in a few days, but we are also a few days from the end of the year, when I review my year, both accomplishments and regrets. The Tao of Enough 19 Dec Written By Mo Issa I’m up at 5 am, and before I’ve even had my coffee, my mind is buzzing, and my heart is racing. Not only am I travelling in a few days, but we are also a few days from the end of the year, when I review my year, both accomplishments and regrets.I sit to try and meditate, but all I can hear is my voice whispering, “I’ve not done enough this year. I’ve missed targets and abandoned goals—what a waste 2024 was”Welcome to the hedonic treadmill. We hustle for a win, only to start sprinting after the next one. The problem is that we never reach a point where we can pause, breathe, and say, “This is enough.”We’re obsessed with output. It’s go-go-go: check emails, chug coffee, update the spreadsheet, schedule the Zoom meeting, squeeze in a workout, and post on social media to keep the personal brand alive.This manic dance, this endless loop, is what we call “daily life.”And yet, no matter what we achieve, that feeling of “I’m complete now” never sticks. Achievements give us a fleeting high, but the crash always comes. Then we start chasing again. It’s a cycle destined to keep us perpetually dissatisfied.Sure, hitting goals feels great—finishing a project, getting promoted, or moving into a better apartment is undeniably rewarding. The problem is we’ve turned productivity into a measure of our self-worth.We tell ourselves, “I’ll be happy when I reach X.” But when we do, we celebrate for five minutes and move the goalposts further. Deep down, we know it’s never enough.That’s the treadmill: an endless run to nowhere.Lao Tzu, the legendary Chinese philosopher and founder of Taoism, would probably shake his head at all this frenzy. His wisdom was rooted in flowing with life, letting the mud settle so the water could clear, and embracing stillness rather than forcing things.This relentless “I must do more” mindset drags us out of the present moment, hurling us into an imaginary future where we think we’ll finally feel okay. However, Lao Tzu suggests that true peace comes not from pushing harder but from letting go of that frantic need. “Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you. ” — Lao Tzu Centuries later, Eckhart Tolle echoed the same idea. He says we suffer because we resist what’s right here, right now. We’re too busy fantasising about some future version of ourselves who has it all together. Tolle urges us to realise that we already live in the only moment that exists: this one.If we could just show up fully in the present, we’d see that the madness of endless productivity is unnecessary. Our worth isn’t tied to the next big win.This doesn’t mean quitting our jobs or refusing to work hard.It means shifting how we relate to our efforts.Mindfulness—a fancy term for paying attention—teaches us to notice what’s happening inside. That tightness in your chest when you think about deadlines? The mental scorecard of what you did (or didn’t) accomplish?Mindfulness says, “Notice that. Don’t fix it; just see it.”By observing how tightly we tie our mood to our output, we loosen the knot. We begin to see that our value doesn’t depend on ticking boxes.The digital age has only amplified this struggle. Our phones constantly remind us that others are doing more, achieving more, and living “better” lives. This fuels an internal panic: “I’m falling behind!”It’s never been easier to compare—and never harder to just exist.But if we pause and take a breath—if we notice the ever-changing clouds above us or listen to the chirps of the birds outside—we might realise life is okay as it is.This doesn’t mean we stop improving ourselves. It means we stop betting our happiness on reaching some imaginary finish line.Here’s the paradox: the world often rewards productivity, but we perform better when approaching our work from a grounded, mindful place. Without the internal pressure cooker, creativity flows, and focus improves.Letting go of the need to impress frees us to do genuinely good work.Lao Tzu and Eckhart Tolle aren’t telling us to abandon effort—they’re showing us a healthier way. If we’re always sprinting ahead, we miss that we’re alive right now.And if we can’t feel alive in this moment, what’s the point of all the hustle?Society’s narrative says we must constantly produce, improve, and achieve. But what if we recognised that we’re already enough, just as we are?The new year is only days away. Let’s start by stepping off the treadmill and grounding ourselves in the present moment. Let’s feel our feet on the ground instead of lunging toward the next big thing.Let’s breathe.Let’s recognise that life is happening now—not after the next milestone.We are allowed to pause, to feel enough, and to discover that happiness is not a prize to be won.It’s something we can experience right here, right now. taothe taotao of enoughenough Mo Issa Previous Previous A Year in Words: My Six Most Memorable Posts of 2024 Next Next Relief: The Uncelebrated Emotion That Fuels Growth --- ### Relief: The Uncelebrated Emotion That Fuels Growth Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/emotion-that-fuels-growth Description: It was the second day of the six-day Salkantay trail to Machu Picchu, and it was the most challenging. At an elevation of 4,800 meters (15,750 feet), though I was fit enough, I struggled to breathe, stopping every few minutes to take five deep breaths. Relief: The Uncelebrated Emotion That Fuels Growth 12 Dec Written By Mo Issa It was the second day of the six-day Salkantay trail to Machu Picchu, and it was the most challenging. At an elevation of 4,800 meters (15,750 feet), though I was fit enough, I struggled to breathe, stopping every few minutes to take five deep breaths.Meanwhile, my wife and friends seemed to handle the altitude better, which pushed me to keep going. Ego isn’t always the villain we make it out to be—it can drive us forward when we’re tempted to quit.The Salkantay Trail itself is a marvel. It’s an alternative route to the more famous Inca Trail, offering breathtaking views of Humantay Mountain, the majestic peaks of the Andes, and the extraordinary natural beauty of Machu Picchu’s surrounding landscapes. The gruelling trek is known for its diverse geography and the rich culture of the Andean people.That second day tested my limits, but eventually, I made it to the lodge at the top. What I remember most vividly from that moment is not joy or triumph but relief. I made it. I sat there, breathing in the crisp mountain air, thankful I had pushed through. Relief, in that moment, was my reward.Relief on the CourtFast-forward a month, I found myself in a different kind of challenge—a Padel(a Mix of Tennis and Squash) tournament. My partner was young enough to be my son and one of the best players. Expectations were high, and we were among the favourites to win.Our quarterfinal match was against two twenty-somethings. It was a hot and humid Sunday morning, and the game quickly became a test of endurance. We lost the first set but clawed our way back to level the match. By the third set, I was utterly spent. The heat, humidity, and sheer pace of the game had drained me.We lost. As I sat on a nearby bench, drenched in sweat and gasping for air, a familiar feeling washed over me—not anger, frustration, or disappointment, but relief.Friends approached, expecting to find me livid, but instead, they found me smiling. I wasn’t upset because I knew I had given everything I had. More importantly, I knew I couldn’t have competed in the semi-final even if we’d won.Relief, once again, became my companion.Relief is an understated emotion. It’s neither flashy nor dramatic, often overshadowed by joy, anger, or frustration. Yet, it’s one of the most profound feelings we experience—a quiet exhale after the storm.The Value of ReliefRelief is a feeling of reassurance and relaxation after a release from anxiety or distress. It’s the calm after the storm, the quiet acknowledgement we’ve endured and emerged on the other side.But why do we put ourselves in situations that invite stress and anxiety? Why push through the discomfort of a gruelling hike or the intensity of a competition? Why not stay in the comfort of our routines, journaling, reading, or enjoying a cigar in peace?For me, the answer lies in growth.Growth demands discomfort. It requires stepping out of our comfort zones and facing challenges that test our limits.Relief signals that we’ve pushed ourselves, stretched our boundaries and survived.Each time I push through a challenge, I emerge stronger.The Salkantay trail didn’t just offer me breathtaking views; it taught me resilience. The Padel tournament didn’t just test my endurance; it improved my game.Relief is also a celebration—quieter but more profound than clinking glasses. It’s the body and mind acknowledging effort and perseverance.For me, true celebration often involves sitting quietly with a cigar or a glass of wine, savouring the moment I feel inner growth.A physiotherapist once told me, “Stretch, release, go further.”Growth works the same way. Each challenge stretches us, sometimes to the point of pain, but the following release allows us to go further the next time.Relief reminds us that we’ve endured, grown, and are better for it. It’s a quiet triumph, a marker of progress, and a celebration of resilience.So the next time you feel relief, don’t dismiss it.Embrace it as a sign of your growth—a reminder that you’ve stretched, pushed, and made it to the other side. reliefuncelebratedemotiongrowthfuelfuels Mo Issa Previous Previous The Tao of Enough Next Next Break Free from the Rat race Interview --- ### Break Free from the Rat race Interview Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/break-free Description: After a devastating family tragedy, I was forced to reexamine everything I thought I knew about success and happiness. In this conversation, I share the six surprising catalysts that helped me transform my life—from the timeless wisdom of Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich to Brené Brown’s groundbreaking TED Talk on vulnerability. Break Free from the Rat race Interview 28 Nov Written By Mo Issa Podcast with Hussein Al-BaiatyAfter a devastating family tragedy, I was forced to reexamine everything I thought I knew about success and happiness. In this conversation, I share the six surprising catalysts that helped me transform my life—from the timeless wisdom of Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich to Brené Brown’s groundbreaking TED Talk on vulnerability.If you’re stuck or searching for meaning, this interview will inspire you to rethink your path and embrace the power of change. breakfreebreakfreerat raceinterview Mo Issa Previous Previous Relief: The Uncelebrated Emotion That Fuels Growth Next Next The Power of Vulnerability: The Heartfelt Response to My Book Launch Request --- ### The Power of Vulnerability: The Heartfelt Response to My Book Launch Request Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/the-power-of-vulnerability-the-heartfelt-response-to-my-book-launch-request Description: Can you please please buy my book for under a dollar and give me a review when you’ve read it? Of course, it would help with Amazon’s algorithms and push it to become a No.1 bestseller in specific categories. The Power of Vulnerability: The Heartfelt Response to My Book Launch Request 20 Nov Written By Mo Issa “Can you please please buy my book for under a dollar and give me a review when you’ve read it? Of course, it would help with Amazon’s algorithms and push it to become a No.1 bestseller in specific categories.”That was what I asked of my inner circle of one hundred people I know.That was the essence of my newsletter’s content last week.That was what I did for eight hours non-stop on Tuesday last week.And you know the response—almost everyone who could buy the book did so. Whoever had access to the reviews section also made a review.I was staggered and overwhelmed by how everyone wanted to help and contribute to my book’s success.Humanity in action, I thought. After careful reflection, I understood why.I was ‘Vulnerability’ in action. Getting off my high horse and asking for support made me vulnerable enough to open my heart. I spoke in a universal and intuitive language that everyone understood.I opened the hardened walls of my heart to connect.Brene Brown defines vulnerability as “uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. It is the core, the heart, the centre of meaningful human experiences.” She says, “Vulnerability isn’t good or bad: it’s not what we call a dark emotion, nor is it always a light, positive experience.”I put my hand out, not knowing what to expect, but I received overwhelming love and support. Everyone told me somehow that “they’ve got my back.”Human beings are innately good. They want to help, cooperate, support, and have your back, but only if you’re genuine enough to really want it. Only if your inner core truly desires it. Only if you allow your soul to remove the ego and possess the flesh.After one woman called me to say she had asked her daughter in Canada to buy and review the book for me because she doesn’t have an Amazon account, I got so emotional that tears unexpectedly started to fall.Growing up with a mindset that meant admitting weaknesses was not intelligent meant it took me a long time to understand and appreciate the power of vulnerability.Today, I understand that when we allow our true feelings to guide us, we magically meet and open up to the right people. The more we open our hearts, the greater our capacity for empathy. The greater our capacity for empathy, the more self-aware we become.In the end, my book's reaching number one didn't really matter. Sure, I will lead with it, as I’ve done here, and it will help book sales.But I know that on my deathbed, the only thing that I will recall is the heartfelt connection I made with those people who showed up for me.Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. vulnerabilityresponseheartfeltbookbook launchpowerpower of vulnerability Mo Issa Previous Previous Break Free from the Rat race Interview Next Next Talking About the Midlife Shift --- ### Talking About the Midlife Shift Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/talking-about-the-midlife-shift Description: Are you in the rat race, want to get out and find yourself? Are you finding yourself at midlife and realizing you want a more fulfilling, authentic life? You are not alone. Talking About the Midlife Shift 14 Nov Written By Mo Issa Are you in the rat race, want to get out and find yourself? Are you finding yourself at midlife and realizing you want a more fulfilling, authentic life? You are not alone.Podcast with Jason Mefford “In this episode I talk with my friend Mo Issa who recently published his new book, "The Midlife Shift: How I Left The Rat Race and Found Myself" who shares his path to more peace as he is navigating the second half of his life in a new way.From feeling like he just wanted to run away to an ashram in Tibet, finding peace in a war zone, synchronicity of getting a tattoo, and adding another hat to his life of personal development, in addition to his work and family life. As a successful business owner and writer, he shares how he is now more intentional, changing his beliefs, giving up control, working on having the whole pie, and so much more as he chose to invest a part of each day to his personal development.This an so much more in this episode as Mo shares golden nuggets from what he is learning and how he is changing each day.” jamming with jasonmidlifemidlife shifttalkinterview Mo Issa Previous Previous The Power of Vulnerability: The Heartfelt Response to My Book Launch Request Next Next My new book, The Midlife Shift, is published today! --- ### My new book, The Midlife Shift, is published today! Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/midlife-shift-is-published-today Description: The Midlife Shift shares my journey from a wealth-focused businessman facing crisis and burnout to someone who found real satisfaction and meaning by looking within. It’s a story of transformation, as I grappled with life’s toughest questions and found a new path to fulfillment. My new book, The Midlife Shift, is published today! 12 Nov Written By Mo Issa I’m excited to let you know that my new book, The Midlife Shift, officially launches today! My last book, The Shift, was purely Self-Help. However, after being inspired by so many memoirs, I felt that people would resonate if I stopped telling readers what to do and instead shared my own life, experiences, and stories, precisely how they happened.I decided: I’m a memoirist—not a self-help guru.The Midlife Shift shares my journey from a wealth-focused businessman facing crisis and burnout to someone who found real satisfaction and meaning by looking within. It’s a story of transformation, as I grappled with life’s toughest questions and found a new path to fulfillment.Most importantly, this book invites you to explore your own values, redefine success, and discover what truly brings you joy.My publisher has agreed to discount the Kindle version of my book from its full list price down to $0.99 for the first week of launch so I can share it with my readers on Substack inexpensively. I’d love to offer you a discount copy!Click here to download the book.I’d be extremely grateful if you could buy the Kindle version and leave a review. Reviews are the most important factor in how many new readers the book is able to reach, and each one makes a real difference.That’s it! Thank you so much for your support. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. Below this note is the full Introduction from the book. I hope you enjoy it, and thanks for being part of this community—it’s deeply rewarding to share and participate here with you all.Sincerely,Mo Introduction “Your problems have nothing to do with your heart but with your head,” the doctor said.It was May 2008 when my doctor suggested I see a psychiatrist for my malaise. What I was going through was not heart failure but panic attacks. It’s true, the twelve months leading up to that point were turbulent, but I’d felt a dissatisfaction creeping into my being well before then. Somehow, the fulfilment I used to get from working at my company was drowned by the weight of responsibilities and expectations.I still wasn’t as financially free as I thought I would be when I first created my company fifteen years earlier. Yes, my earnings helped support a rich, extravagant, and busy life, but I had no safety net. Buying four Rolex watches within eighteen months wasn’t making my happiness last. The more I made, the more affluent my life became. I had become enslaved not by a person or a giant corporation but by striving for money, prestige, and success.On that night in 2008, on a hotel balcony in Lebanon, with a cigar in hand, I contemplated the doctor’s words and could see, for the first time, myself split into two. First was the extroverted and successful business owner, an esteemed member of society whom everyone thought they knew and admired. Then there was the other person who no one but I knew. The person who wanted to be alone with his thoughts and had an insatiable curiosity about the mysticism of life. The person who craved a far less lavish lifestyle.It was now apparent that the formula for living the good life I’d learned through osmosis was failing me. Striving for success, money, and prestige wasn’t giving me the happiness I thought my achievements guaranteed.I had followed the model my father had shown me—what all of his peers and what the wider Lebanese expatriate society had demonstrated regularly. A good life was about hard work, making money, taking care of your family, climbing the status ladder, and enjoying the fruits.At the start of my adult life, I followed it so well that, together with the family and friends that I grew up with, we became the talk of the town, the envy of many, and the top of the list for any dinner or party invitation. We were wealthy, affluent, and sophisticated, all regularly criss-crossing the globe. As a result, we were dubbed the Millionaire’s Club.However, by the time the panic attacks began in 2008, I had become disillusioned, ambivalent and angry. I’d lost my zeal for my business and started questioning myself and the values under which I’d been living.Why wasn’t I happy? Why did the rest of the Millionaire’s Club seem much more content than I did? These constant questions plagued me. Then, as my ruminations and reflections got more profound, I started to ask a more searching question:What if I was living my life all wrong?Maybe it didn’t matter what other people thought of my life. Maybe it didn’t even matter that I was living according to a self-imposed happiness formula. None of it matched what was true in my heart.As we’ve evolved from being hunter-gatherers to more sophisticated human beings, our brains and psychological needs have grown. Today, there is an existential crisis that has left many, like me, feeling depressed, empty, and in search of meaning.The uncomfortable truth is that we go through the first part of our lives in action mode, like rats chasing dopamine hit after dopamine hit, until a crisis beckons us to ask: “What if we are all living our lives the wrong way?”We all need to sit up at various stages of our lives and ask ourselves if we are on our rightful, authentic paths. We so seldom do this. Instead, we allow the busyness of life to numb us into believing that we are doing fine. Without warning, we become slaves to our impulses—those desires consciously and subconsciously bestowed upon us by our genetic disposition, upbringing and environment, the constant media barrage, and the confusing signals of our bodies. The breakneck speed of today’s world doesn’t make it any easier on us. There are endless options on how to live and a never-ending number of gurus telling us how to become our best selves. There are also easy and accessible platforms for us to compete and compare. Unfortunately, the noise surrounding us has stopped our music’s eruption from within.We can all live happier, more content lives full of meaningful experiences and unique connections—and still leave a legacy—without the need for striving and without the running and the exhaustion that comes with it.We can be healthy and have enough money to be free from needing other people, governments, or institutions. We can have a wonderful group of friends and family around us and feel useful by contributing to our communities without feeling pressured to live in the rat race.First, we need to slow down, dig deeper into ourselves, and find out what we want. We must discover the obstacles that stand in our way and recognise the values we want to live by. We must then use those values to inform the kind of lives we want to live. No, it’s not easy, but when we accept that struggle and discomfort are ways to grow and that doing the work on ourselves means removing the old paradigms that don’t serve us anymore, we slowly install the habits that can lead us to what we truly want.My story is not a Hollywood rags-to-riches story but rather a story of growing self-awareness. This inner journey is long and endless, but it’s a human one. As Socrates said thousands of years ago, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”I got to know myself much better by removing my egoic exterior, layer after layer. I share my innermost feelings as a testament for others to see why examining our values and beliefs is imperative. These values are the springboard from which we can clarify what we want . . . and then have the courage to go for it.As I started to let go of the old values that I’d lived by, I was able to create new ones that resonated more with my authentic self. As a result, I started to live a more meaningful life aligned with my fresh set of values.My values were now not extrinsically motivated but more intrinsically driven. Instead of success, prestige, accomplishment, and money, I now craved creativity, presence, simplicity, vulnerability, and authenticity. Instead of allowing my mind and society’s influence to affect my wants, I now allowed my heart and body to lead the way. The more I expressed the depths of my soul and allowed my muted voice to speak, the better I connected with people and the world.My self-discovery journey has been long and riddled with cul-de-sacs, where old demons pulled me into bouts of confusion, ambivalence, and mild depression. However, because I failed repeatedly, my path was being self-corrected, just like a rocket shooting from the Earth to the moon; it adjusts its trajectory slowly but surely to land on the right spot.Through this journey, I have come to know what I stand for. I’ve clarified my values and have a particular worldview that has become my North Star. These guiding principles include:Accepting that letting go of comfort and ease and allowing more pain and struggle in our lives means more growth, presence, and richness of life.Not caring about society’s whims (e.g., status and prestige) and instead focusing on having genuine connection and community.Recognising that money beyond a certain point poisons the heart and that living frugally and simply results in purity and freedom.Embracing the ordinary—being humble, useful, and competent—rather than the egocentric concept of trying to be extraordinary and saving the world.Keeping the following mantra as a guide: Get into action. Do what you love. Go for your goals. But detach from the results. Detach from the fruits of your actions. We can only control our actions—not their outcomes. But we should never—never—detach from our actions. We lose ourselves if we do.As you follow along on my personal journey, I hope you too will come to see the value in these principles and find ways to adapt them for yourself. You deserve a life free of malaise—free of the disconnect that comes along with superficial success. But this can only be achieved through a fundamental shift in your mindset and the way you view yourself in the world. Allow me to share my experiences and learnings to guide you toward a deeper, richer, and more content life. Thank you for reading.The Midlife Shift: How I Left the Rat Race and Found Myself is available now on Amazon and Apple Books.If you are in Ghana and want to order a copy, please call 0244334948.Here are a few endorsements received from advance readers:"The Midlife Shift is a powerful and relatable journey that speaks directly to anyone standing at the crossroads of midlife, seeking deeper meaning and fulfillment. With raw honesty, Mo reveals the profound transformations that come when we step away from external success and lean into self-discovery and authenticity. His story is an inspiring reminder that it's never too late to rewrite our narrative and live in alignment with our true values. This book is essential reading for those ready to embrace their midlife shift with courage and intention."—CHIP CONLEY, New York Times Bestselling Author of Learning to Love Midlife & Founder of MEA"Whether you've tasted success, faced adversity, or feel a lingering malaise, The Midlife Shift reminds us that our best times can still lie ahead. With Issa's warmth and wisdom, this book shows how a purposeful life only grows richer over time."—RICHARD LEIDER, International bestselling author of The Power of Purpose, Repacking Your Bags, and Life Reimagined"This book was just what I needed when I needed it. Midlife can be confusing and disorienting, but it doesn't have to be a crisis—it can be an awakening. Mo Issa's book will show you how."—JEFF GOINS, bestselling author of The Art of Work booknew bookmidlifeshiftpublished Mo Issa Previous Previous Talking About the Midlife Shift Next Next On Writing a Memoir --- ### On Writing a Memoir Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/on-writing-a-memoir Description: My last book, The Shift, was purely Self-Help. However, after being inspired by so many memoirs, I felt that people would resonate if I stopped telling readers what to do and instead shared my own life, experiences, and stories, precisely how they happened. On Writing a Memoir 7 Nov Written By Mo Issa “The memoir isn’t the summary of a life; it’s a window into a life…” — William Zinsser Good memoirs are hard to write.The truth is I’m not a celebrity. Who would want a window to my dull life littered with failures?I started writing this memoir seven years ago while pursuing my MFA in 2017. Although I stopped and started many times, I did finish it, not without the help and support of many people, most notably my writing coach.Thank you, Julie ArtzThe most important thing was not just finishing it but that I wrote simply and honestly, not caring what people would make of my life.The initial feedback that I’m getting is that people resonate with my rawness and vulnerability.Why Memoir and Not Self-HelpMy last book, The Shift, was purely Self-Help. However, after being inspired by so many memoirs, I felt that people would resonate if I stopped telling readers what to do and instead shared my own life, experiences, and stories, precisely how they happened.I decided: I’m a memoirist—not a self-help guru.These days, we are inundated with self-help material in the form of seminars, viral blog posts, New York Times Best Sellers, and YouTube shorts, all of it telling us what to do and how to do it.However, all that “how-to” content doesn’t compel us (the readers) to make significant change. Maybe we get inspired for a few hours or days—but then that video or lecture or book fades away to make space for newer and more interesting information.Don’t get me wrong, self-help books, podcasts and seminars are an excellent place to start, but after a while they lose their effect and diminish in value.Inspiration without action becomes a frustrating exercise in futility.In today’s personal development world, information flows incessantly. This week it is affirmations. Next week it’s how to “let go.” And then there’s the infamous “law of attraction,” always the centre of some seminar, book, or show.It’s hard to know where to look and who to trust.However, this all changes when the information we take in becomes charged with emotions; our odds of getting into action rise dramatically. When we—as bloggers, writers, or even motivational speakers—share our personal experiences, we help others to viscerally relate to our material. In effect, we become memoirists: “I’m telling you what I did. See if it helps or works for you.”In sharing ourselves and our experiences through the craft of memoir, we replicate the age-old tradition of storytelling. Here, emotionally compelling tales are handed down from generation to generation. These stories allow us to connect dots and grasp the lessons that relate to us.Scientific research confirms that reading others’ stories and empathizing with them raises our levels of the feel-good hormone oxytocin.In writing terminology, “other people’s stories” means memoir.A memoir, as defined by Merriam-Webster dictionary, is “a narrative composed from personal experience.” It is also “an account of something noteworthy.” A memoir differs from autobiography in that it usually covers one specific aspect of the writer’s life, while an autobiography focuses on the chronology of the writer’s entire life.We can trace the origins of the memoir back to 371 A.D., when St. Augustine wrote his “Confessions.” In trying to understand the misdemeanours of his youth, he wrote honestly and explicitly. His vulnerability had an enormous impact on the history of Christianity. Through his words, multitudes of people realised that we humans can be fallible, but that we can always change our ways and seek redemption.Only in the last 50 years, however, has the memoir genre exploded into our literary world. It’s not so far-fetched to foresee it soon overtaking the self-help franchise in popularity.The process of a memoir is itself significant; by unravelling their stories, memoirists give the reader the power to unravel his or her own. The reader may not have lived the same precise details as the memoirist, but we all share common threads and themes.For instance, in sharing how he or she became aware of past traumas and dealt with them, the memoirist gives hope to the reader. The memoirist tells the reader, “I’ve been through pain, but I’ve survived. There’s hope for you too.”In The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr further explains this function of generating hope. She writes:“When I asked a class of undergrads what they liked about memoir, I heard them echo the no-doubt-naive sentiment that they drew hope from the mere fact of a writer living past a bad juncture to report on it. “It’s a miracle he even survived!” was written on many papers. The telling has some magic power for them, as it does for me. “Tell it,” the soldiers in Vietnam begged Michael Herr, and in Dispatches, he told it.”In reading the stories of our fellow human beings, we discover empathy for their lives. We see how they lived and understand why they reacted to specific circumstances in certain ways. The sharing of pain and the communal, “tribal” healing that follows binds us human beings to one another in a distinctly positive way.The famous memoirist Tobias Wolff had a particularly difficult childhood. A lack of real parenting and support left a lasting imprint on his future self. However, in writing his memoir, This Boy’s Life, Wolff not only recalled the memories that defined who and what he had become, but also extinguished their paralysing effect on him by translating memory into words.After reading his memoir, I understood why he decided to join the army (and many other things). It gave him the authority and self-possession he lacked. This decision ultimately led to his success as one of the best American writers.In Out of Africa, Karen Blixen uses her pen name Isak Dinesen to write a memoir about her years as a farm owner in the Ngong foothills outside Nairobi, in what is now Kenya, East Africa. What I find most interesting about her story is that she seems less interested in facts, figures, dates, history, or politics, and instead focuses on her relationship with a male-dominated colonial settlement in East Africa.I saw a different Africa, probably a more authentic one, than the Africa I live in today. Her viewpoint expanded my perspective, even though it was written almost 100 years ago.In When Breath Becomes Air, brilliant neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi is diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer at the age of 36. However, this book doesn’t just detail the facts of his cancer, but rather proffers a more profound look at life and death.The way Kalanithi approaches death with courage, dignity and grace—and the skill with which his experience is translated to the page—left me questioning my own sense of mortality.The Midlife ShiftWe can only share information we’ve owned—knowledge that has arisen from or worked in our lives. We can only preach the lessons we’ve learned and the changes we’ve made.We are all interconnected. Writers and readers. We need to dig into our own experience—and one another’s—to reconnect over and over again.When we do (through reading and writing memoirs, for instance), we acknowledge our shared humanity. We give away parts of ourselves. We say, “I get you,” “I can see where you’re coming from” or, “I feel you.”When we charge information with emotions, we become ready to change—in a way that is uniquely us.In my memoir, I’ve admitted that I’ve often failed. I’ve also accepted that I’m not in total control of my future. I’m only on a path that feels right, even if I’m unsure of the destination.There was no Hollywood moment where I was transformed into a superhero. Instead, it’s been a long grind of one step forward and two steps back.To put on paper that acceptance and understand it was freeing for me.I hope you read my book, which is coming out on Amazon this Tuesday, 12th November, and that you will allow a few sentences to touch your heart.Thank you. memoirwritingwriting a memoirmo-issamoissamo issa Mo Issa Previous Previous My new book, The Midlife Shift, is published today! Next Next Introducing 'The Midlife Shift.' --- ### Introducing 'The Midlife Shift.' Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/introducing-the-midlife-shift Description: Discover how my experiences with writing, running, and reflection have guided me towards a more fulfilling life. Learn about the importance of embracing vulnerability and simplifying life to enhance self-awareness and personal growth. Introducing 'The Midlife Shift.' 31 Oct Written By Mo Issa Podcast with Andrea SamediJoin Andrea and me in exploring my latest book, The Midlife Shift. (COMING OUT on NOV 12th, 2024).In it, I share my personal journey from living a life of success and prestige to finding deeper meaning and authenticity.Through candid conversations, I reveal how vulnerability and self-discovery have reshaped my life, offering invaluable insights for those seeking to live their true, authentic selves.Discover how my experiences with writing, running, and reflection have guided me towards a more fulfilling life. Learn about the importance of embracing vulnerability and simplifying life to enhance self-awareness and personal growth.Whether you're navigating midlife changes or seeking to deepen your self-awareness, this episode provides a profound exploration of living with authenticity and purpose. Podcast with Andrea Samediandreasamediandrea samediinterviewthe midlife shiftmidlifemo issamoissamo- Mo Issa Previous Previous On Writing a Memoir Next Next Dancing with Reality: A Journey Through Time, Nature, and Magic Mushrooms --- ### Dancing with Reality: A Journey Through Time, Nature, and Magic Mushrooms Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/dancing-with-reality Description: I decided to gobble up the remaining hundred grams in the bag. My impatience and striving were kicking in, even when I was meant to relax and revere the experience. Dancing with Reality: A Journey Through Time, Nature, and Magic Mushrooms 24 Oct Written By Mo Issa An excerpt from The Midlife ShiftI looked at my watch; it was still 9:45 a.m.Nothing was happening beyond my mouth drying up, a slight rise in body temperature, and having to squint from the glaring sunlight.I put on my sunglasses, sat for a while, and then looked at my watch again. It was only 10:15 a.m., and time was moving slowly. I was now getting frustrated that the effects of the mushrooms were not that strong and wondered if these mushrooms were past their sell-by date.I decided to gobble up the remaining hundred grams in the bag. My impatience and striving were kicking in, even when I was meant to relax and revere the experience.Thirty minutes later, I started to feel heavier, and the light was now even brighter. My knees went slightly weak, but I was still very much not “turned on” yet as the infamous Timothy Leary said many years ago.Earlier in the week, I’d had an in-depth conversation about having a successful shrooms trip with an American friend I’d met in the Paris writing programme. He urged me not to control things but to let go, sit still, and allow the mushrooms to do the work. Following his advice, I relaxed, and soon, the light became so bright that I was wincing through my sunglasses.I also became extremely heavy, needing to move myself consciously. As I got up, I felt like throwing up. I’d read that nausea meant fear, so I calmed myself again by remembering that there was nothing to be afraid of. Quickly, the nausea disappeared. A theme apparent throughout the day was that whatever I thought of immediately manifested and became a reality. The effects of the psilocybin were finally kicking in.Looking at the dwarf palm trees on my left, I was enthralled by their movement. They were dancing to the rhythm of the lounge music that blared out. Their large stems and leaves were moving, laughing, and somehow enticing me to join. Looking up, I saw that the skyline was one huge canvas of masterful art—intense and beautiful blue with small willowy clouds scattered around.It seemed that whatever I looked at got magnified. The details I saw were intricate and amazing, as if I were simultaneously using both a telescope and a microscope.When I closed my eyes, I felt bliss, an inner peace percolating. I also had a fixed smile on my face and could feel the weight of my cheeks creating that smile, which was confirmed afterwards when I saw pictures of myself. (Yes, I took selfies throughout the day.)I wasn’t aware of the time anymore, but what felt like a few minutes later, I felt restless and tried to get up. Again, I felt heavy, as if I were wearing my body like a Roman soldier would bear his suit of armour. I trudged toward the pool, and the tiles I stepped on seemed more prominent and detailed than I had ever noticed. Was that dark brown line at the edge of the right side of the pool always there?Then, there was the attack of vibrant colours from everything around me, both within the pool and in the garden it overlooked. I thought I was seeing new colours. Before getting into the pool, I turned to the plants behind me. The luscious white flowers sprouting out seemed to smile, inviting me to come over to their side.When I got closer, I felt a loving feeling within me. I sound like a typical New Age dabbler, but that’s how I felt around them. They didn’t turn out to be white tulips, but Mussaenda Philippics Aurora, my wife, would inform me later. They had been there for four years, but that was the first time I had noticed them. Still, they told me they’d always be there, ready and waiting to offer me love in return.I then walked toward the front end of the garden, an area reserved for the orchids that we had spent so much time and money on. I picked up a red orchid flower that had fallen onto the ground. I looked closely at it but found it slightly repugnant and immediately left the orchid area. There was something that I didn’t like about them. Perhaps they had become the symbol of arrogance, materialism, and superficial aesthetics—a metaphor for how I often viewed my life. They didn’t have the simplicity, purity, and love the other plants showed.I then turned my attention to a line of small red flowers that rested on the meandering branches of the small cactus tree. Again, the details that I was noticing were incredible. Where did these squarish red flowers placed on the snake-like roots come from? I spent what seemed like hours (though it was probably only a few minutes) observing every fine detail of this unique plant, which I'd also ignored over the last few years. They were called Euphorbia milii.I was getting hot and needed to cool myself, so I walked down the pool’s wide stairway and immersed half of my body. I looked up at the skyline again, and birds buzzed around me. They were everywhere, whether high in the sky or closer to me on the ground. Suddenly, three big, scary black and white crows with sinister looks about them circled above me. They were not as majestic as the larger yellow kites that soared above them.Before I could unpack that, one small robin flew within inches of my face. All the birds seemed to be playing with me, happy that I visited their world. Just as I wondered why I hadn’t seen a white seagull, my favourite bird, one landed on the green rooftop of a neighbour’s house, did a twirl, and then flew off.Again, inexplicably, it was as if anytime I thought of something, it would materialise right before me. dancing with realityjourneydancingrealitytimenaturemagicmagic mushroommushrooms Mo Issa Previous Previous Introducing 'The Midlife Shift.' Next Next Why Procrastination is a Mask to Deeper Issues --- ### Why Procrastination is a Mask to Deeper Issues Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/deeper-issues Description: The procrastination was not circumstantial but was deeper, masked by the many fears lying in my subconscious. During those arid writing months, I’d get my laptop out and proceed to spend the next few hours doing nothing but staring at the blank screen, followed by much ruminating on why I couldn’t write. Why Procrastination is a Mask to Deeper Issues 17 Oct Written By Mo Issa Excerpt from The Midlife ShiftThough I had my notes, thoughts, and ideas on how to write the book, I still needed to sit down and do it. I wanted to finish it before my impending travels to Goddard College in June. However, it was now March, and I still hadn’t written a word.The procrastination was not circumstantial but was deeper, masked by the many fears lying in my subconscious. During those arid writing months, I’d get my laptop out and proceed to spend the next few hours doing nothing but staring at the blank screen, followed by much ruminating on why I couldn’t write.The truth was I shouldn’t have worried whether I wrote or not. My livelihood didn’t depend on writing. I was not contracted by any newspaper or beholden to any pressing deadline. I had no expected date of manuscript submission to an editor. I was self-publishing a book for me.Yet during those few months of not writing, I ended each day full of guilt. I had linked my new authentic self ’s worth to writing. Thus, in not writing,I’d become nothing.Finally, a week into March, I decided that I needed to do something about my lack of writing. What was the source of the procrastination? Why had I felt so bad when I stopped writing? Using some ideas from Julia Cameron again, I first gave myself permission not to write for a whole week.Then I wrote in bold letters on an index card, “Why do I feel that I must create?” and carried it with me for a week. As is always the case when we focus our consciousness on a particular question or incident, many answers serendipitously arose—thoughts, conversations, articles, movies, books, and more.I came across a simple but telling contribution from one of my favourite writers, poets and thinkers, Khalil Gibran.In a letter to Mary Haskell penned on November 10, 1911, Gibran wrote:“There is an old Arabic song which begins ‘Only God and I know what is in my heart’—and today, after rereading your last three letters, I said out loud, ‘Only God and Mary and I know what is in my heart.’ I would open my heart and carry it in my hand so that others may know also; for there is no deeper desire than the desire of being revealed. We all want that little light in us to be taken from under the bushel. The first poet must have suffered much when the cave-dwellers laughed at his mad words. He would have given his bow and arrows and lion skin, everything he possessed, just to have his fellow men know the delight and the passion which the sunset had created in his soul. And yet, is it not this mystic pain—the pain of not being known—that gives birth to art and artists?”Gibran’s words are so elegant that his wisdom never fails to strike me instantaneously. “There is no deeper desire than the desire of being revealed.”I meditated on that sentence for a while and realised that, like all human beings, I yearned to reveal my true inner self to the outside world. I wanted my madness to be seen. To be accepted. To be understood.Creativity and writing were the driving force that helped me find my inner voice, the means through which I share my authentic self with the world. Through exposing my writing to public audiences I’ve learned I’m part of an interconnected whole. However, even though we are all connected, we are also unique beings.As such, I felt a compulsive longing to show my individuality with writing. Just like a peacock is proud to display his colourful array of feathers, we naturally do the same. It is an aspect of our evolutionary psychology. There is no ego or shame. “This is who I am,” we say.Little wonder then that my writing stalled. There was a lot at stake for me. I was afraid to reveal my inner core to the world, thinking that most readers would judge me as not being good enough. The three-month timeline also didn’t help as I put undue pressure on myself.But with Gibran’s definition of creativity and the understanding I got from why I was writing, the shackles came off. I was writing the best book I could, the one that only I could write. Perhaps I was no Yeats or Hemingway, but I was me. The poetry book was good enough for me. The self-help book was good enough for me. That was all that mattered.I could only show off the feathers that were unique to me. procrastinationmaskdeeper issuesdeepermeaningprocrastinate Mo Issa Previous Previous Dancing with Reality: A Journey Through Time, Nature, and Magic Mushrooms Next Next How Your Values Shape Your Behaviour More Than You Think --- ### How Your Values Shape Your Behaviour More Than You Think Source: https://www.mo-issa.com/blog/shape-your-behaviour Description: Money is a bad value because you can’t always control it. Creativity or industriousness or a strong work ethic are good values because you CAN control them–and doing them well will ultimately generate money as a side effect. How Your Values Shape Your Behaviour More Than You Think 3 Oct Written By Mo Issa On June 11, 1963, Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc burned himself alive on the streets of Saigon. He did so to protest President Ngo Dinh Diem’s oppressive and brutal actions against the majority Buddhist population of Vietnam, which culminated in the killing of nine peaceful protesters by the army.Quang Duc’s act of defiance against a corrupt government fueled a revolution and forever changed the world. The ‘Burning Monk,’ was willing to give up his life for his most important value — the freedom to be a Buddhist in Vietnam.Later, John F. Kennedy would say, “No news picture has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.”Values are core beliefs that we have developed over the years. They are the ethics that we feel so strongly about and the points of view that we find ourselves arguing for in conversations. They are what drive us from the minute we open our eyes, till the moment we sleep.Our values are the GPS of our lives. They set the path on which we want to progress. They form the principles that we are willing to live by, and some, like Quang Duc, would die for.Values are a fundamental part of our identity. We are most often defined by what we choose to find valuable in our lives. Every decision we make is based on that value we’ve placed at the top of our awareness — The lens that we’ve chosen to view the world with.However, our values are often complicated by our upbringing, society, and the effect that the media has on us, and as such, we need to dig deep and find what values define us.Quang Duc had spent years in monastery isolation, was a meditation expert and his Buddhist beliefs were all that he lived by. On that fateful day, he laid a cushion on the streets, crossed his legs and slipped into deep meditation. Another monk took out a gasoline can and poured it all over him.Quang Duc chanted a few words of prayer, lit the match he held in his hand and threw it onto his gasoline filled body. For ten minutes, he sat still burning, never moving or screaming till his body finally collapsed. That act of self-sacrifice would forever alter history.How to Choose our ValuesIn Mark Manson’s book, The Subtle Art of not giving a F*ck, he compares good and bad values in the following 3 ways:Evidence-Based Vs. Emotion-Based ValuesResearch shows that we often make decisions using our feelings and not reason. However, our feelings are often self-entered willing to give up long-term benefits for short-term gains, and are often warped and/or delusional.People who lead their lives based on how they feel will find themselves perpetually on a treadmill, constantly needing more, more, more. Our purpose should be sought not merely through what feels good. It must be considered and reasoned. We must accumulate evidence supporting it. Otherwise, we’ll spend our lives chasing a mirage.Constructive Vs Destructive ValuesWe don’t want to value things that harm ourselves or others. We do want to value things that enhance ourselves and others.If you value martial arts because you enjoy hurting people, then that’s a bad value. But if you value it because you are in the military and want to learn to protect yourself and others — that’s a good value. Ultimately, it’s the intention that matters most.Controlled Vs. Uncontrolled ValuesWhen you value things that are outside your control, you essentially give up your life to that thing.Money is a bad value because you can’t always control it. Creativity or industriousness or a strong work ethic are good values because you CAN control them–and doing them well will ultimately generate money as a side effect.We need values we can control, otherwise our values control us.I’m not saying that we all must die for our values, but we must sacrifice parts of our lives for them. That is, if we genuinely believe in them.For me, learning is a strong value that I live by. That means I’m continually taking leadership courses to help me lead my company. I try to impart training to my team at every opportunity. While in my writing life, I’m continually reading — a book a week, and taking one writing course after another.This value of learning means I’m willing to sacrifice hours of my free time to the extent that I hardly watch any television and have altered my life to have less social outings.Now, when I’m disconnected from learning, I quickly wilt just like a flower without water would.Good values include honesty, bravery, authenticity, humility, vulnerability, self- respect, curiosity, charity and creativity.Bad values include manipulation, self-centredness, people pleasing, comparing, judging, trying to be rich for the sake of being rich.What values do you choose to live your life by? And how much are you willing to sacrifice for them? behaviourvaluesshapeshow your valuesvalues shapesmore than you think Mo Issa Previous Previous Why Procrastination is a Mask to Deeper Issues Next Next From Rooster to White Tiger: The Struggle For Change --- Generated by llmstxtgenerate.com