Lately I've had a lot of time for thinking. Partially because I shut down Blymp back in January and freed up a lot of my mental resources. No clients to follow up with. No admin stuff to stress about. But thinking is also my favourite activity, and there'll always be time in my day for a good old mind-bending. So I sat down, as I often do, alone with my thoughts, and wrote about what business I should and, most importantly, should not consider doing next. The list you are about to read might be similar to Core principles I (try to) live by that I wrote one similarly pensive evening two years ago. Whether it's a comparison or a continuation is hard to say—still, one can't be without the other to show the inexorable passage of time that changed everything and nothing for me all at once. But it also serves another purpose: to remind me in the future, before I get myself involved in some dubious enterprise, what painful mistake I'm about to make by ignoring my values. So here it is, the list. My next business shouldn't (and hopefully won't) be about: Social Media. Enough of this crap. Some productivity bullshit. Do better, not more. Fast fashion and consumerism. Truly, I've already bought everything you wanted to sell me. Some “hack your health” app. Our bodies haven't changed much in the last three hundred thousand years, and they won't change in the next hundred. Or any other app, really. I don't even use my phone anymore. Distracting things and things that require constant attention. Some LLM wrapper with a fancy UI. Indefensible. The number of things I can do with ChatGPT or Claude is ridiculously high. It can surely handle one more thing. What it should (and hopefully will) be about: Sustainable, high-quality products Unscented products Building community Bringing people together, offline Empowering creativity Replacing animal products Doing one thing really damn well Small acts of kindness Things you can touch Things that last Clothes made of natural fibres Art Fun Questioning the status quo Simple, intentional living Deeper understanding of self Spending more time in nature Spending more time with loved ones Things and businesses I get inspired by: Framework: Sustainable/repairable laptops. Bitwarden: Open-source software that does one job really well and charges me a reasonable amount of money per year. Danish design: Beautiful. Sturdy. Timeless. I brought home two Royal Copenhagen mugs the other day. Bike-sharing and car-sharing. Literally anything-sharing. ZSA keyboards. What a keyboard should have always been. A water bottle that won't leak on a plane. Some random-brand bottle bricked my friend's MacBook, and I've been appreciative ever since of the fifty-dollar water bottle that I bought years ago, so hesitant about the price. Coffee. One of those timeless things on Earth. Kobo. It's like Kindle that doesn't decide what's best for you. Upload your own PDF. Or EPUB—whatever. It has physical buttons to flip pages. Best $200 I ever spent. A high-quality safety razor. It's just so nice to hold. A Japanese stainless-steel knife. So nice to hold, too. There are numerous other things that I appreciate having in my life that didn't make it into this list for some reason or another. A familiar mom-and-pop shop in my neighbourhood. A Timemore Black Mirror kitchen scale that just works, every time. A random USB-C charged electronic device that spares me from carrying an extra cable. My radically outdated ten-dollar Casio watch. An old pair of comfy shoes that just won't die. We need more of this in our lives. Things that you desperately look to buy again when they get lost or break or fall apart. Things that someone made a deliberate effort to get right the first time. The quintessence of art and craftsmanship. For all the genius of Steve Jobs, the iPhone wasn't that. It challenged the status quo and was surely a groundbreaking, outstanding piece of technology at the time of its first release. But in twenty years, people won't remember it ever existed. Like Gen Z doesn't remember the Walkman. I'd like to see more businesses that bet on doing one thing really well. Google could still have been the company people remembered for the best search engine if they had doubled down solely on that. Instead, we don't even know what they do anymore: Phones? Clouds? Ads? Certainly ads. I still remember the feeling of holding one of the first PocketBook e-readers in my hands back in Moscow. Pressing its buttons and waiting for what now seems like a torturous three seconds before the screen refreshed. Almost twenty years later and every day still, Kobo gives me exactly that feeling. So hopefully, my next business is the one that lasts.

When I first met Pierre, I couldn't have foreseen what the next three years of our friendship would be like. I had just come back to Montreal. Twice I'd failed to get a place in Toronto. My dream of traveling in a van had also fallen apart. So I rented a U-Haul and went to pick up my furniture from a storage unit. Pierre helped me unload it at the coliving house he had just started up. For Pierre's birthday in February, I made a short film from our first trip together. We found what we mistakenly thought was Crown land and went there to camp. I brought my camera along. I had no intention of filming anything. I was looking to get away, and so was Pierre. The most memorable thing wasn't getting kicked out of someone's private lake, even though I can hardly forget that. It was the chat at the campfire the night before. We talked about our worries and our hopes. About what would become of us. The meaning of it all. Girls, too, obviously. That campfire was where our friendship truly began. I hope the film speaks better than my words can. I love you, Pierre. I wish you the best.

Yesterday, I traded sun, beach, and a beautiful warm sea for a cold, gray sky and a pair of wet shoes. I still can't believe I did it. The constant winter overcast was reason enough to leave Canada and never look back. When I finally left, I had bought a ticket to a never-ending summer. It felt magical. Yet I am here in the cold again, and I couldn't be happier with my choice. I arrived in Marseille this morning. Dressed in light pants and a summer shirt, flip-flops on my bare feet, I stepped out of the airport. Cold rain got under my collar and ran down my spine. I held my small backpack over my head and ran to the bus station. There I bought a ticket to Aix-en-Provence. After four years of waiting, my France chapter has finally begun. I could, perhaps, write about this weird obsession that I’ve had with France for the last four years. About the language, que j’adore. The petit café I had this afternoon followed by a risotto served with the freshest baguette, as if it were the only way to serve risotto. But I’ll keep my message simple: don’t stop dreaming. It's not about some bucket list with three hundred items in it. Nor New Year's resolutions that you regret telling everyone about. But a childish, almost feverish “What if one day I…” sort of dream. Something that you are ashamed to dream of, perhaps because it's so silly or so trivial that you don't know why you should even bother. But you dream nonetheless simply because you can. I remember my first such dream. Back in school, I watched Sean Penn's Into the Wild. I'd never wanted to go to Alaska. And it didn’t seem realistic, living on the opposite side of the world. But it had planted a seed in the back of my mind until more than ten years later I landed in Fairbanks. And today, arriving in Aix, another itch got its long-deserved scratch. I walked into a grocery store and listened to the radio that reminded me of my favorite Café Montréalais on Spotify. I strolled the narrow cobblestone streets and pretended I was the main character of a new episode of Dix pour cent, filmed in Provence for a reason known only to me. It was a dream. But then again, I was living it. Be a fool. Dare to have foolish dreams. They might, after all, come true.

On December 31, I went to Wat Suan Mokkh in Thailand and registered for a ten-day silent retreat. I scribbled these notes on eight scraps of paper given to us for questions on days six and ten. Neither electronics nor diaries were allowed for “creative writing”. And because my writing isn't that creative anyway, here we go: Day -1 Day 0 Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5 Day 6 Day 7 Day 8 Day 9 Day 10 Day 11 -- P.S. A ten-day retreat somehow turned into a two-week-long adventure and will likely take a year to process. But what an experience it was!