My Thoughts on a Good Life

I have been resistant to writing this, because the genre has been colonised by people who have figured it out. They have principles. Frameworks. The five pillars. I have not figured it out. What I have is a set of things I keep returning to, some of them in tension with each other, and a growing sense that the tension is not a problem to be resolved but a condition to be understood.

Freedom from Traps

The clearest thing I can say is that a good life, for me, requires not being trapped. Not in the dramatic sense — not in debt, not in an abusive relationship, not exiled. In the more ordinary sense. A job you cannot leave because the costs of leaving are too high. A city you stay in by default rather than by choice. A version of yourself that other people's expectations have solidified into something you no longer recognise.

Growing up in Colombia and then spending most of my adult life in Northern Europe gave me a particular angle on this. In Medellín, the trap was often material — economic circumstances that genuinely constrained options, violence that made whole neighbourhoods unavailable to whole categories of people. In Stockholm or Zurich, the traps are more internal. Affluence buys out of material constraint and creates a different kind of stuckness: the golden handcuffs, the lifestyle inflation that makes every exit more expensive than the last one, the social identity that becomes indistinguishable from the job title.

I am not immune to any of this. But I think I have managed to keep some of the exits open. The ability to move, to leave, to start again — not as a plan, but as a live option — matters to me more than most things that are supposed to matter.

Intellectual Life as Non-Negotiable

I need to be thinking about something that is not fully resolved. Not as a hobby alongside a life that is otherwise complete. As a central feature of what makes the life feel worth living. The specific topic matters less than the quality of the engagement. Whether it is the physics of self-organisation, the regulatory architecture of instant payments, or what the distribution of hydrogen tells us about the shape of cosmic time — what matters is that the problem has real depth and that I am genuinely further into it than I was six months ago.

This is not about productivity or career advancement. Some of the thinking that has mattered most to me has had no professional application. But it changed how I see other things, which is its own kind of return.

The corollary is that work which does not engage this need — work that is purely transactional, that does not require or reward genuine thinking — drains something that is not easily replenished. I have done enough of it to know the difference.

Relationships Without Performance

This one took longer to understand. I spent years in contexts — professional, social — that rewarded a certain kind of performed self. Competent, adaptable, easy to be around. That is not a bad self to have available. But it is not sufficient for a good life.

What I mean by relationships without performance is something simple: the people who know approximately what is actually going on with you. Not because you unload on them, but because the relationship has enough history and honesty that the gap between the performed version and the actual version is small. Those relationships are rare and, I think, irreplaceable. Geographic mobility, career transitions, and the general tendency of adult social life toward managed presentation make them genuinely hard to maintain.

In Colombia, there is a kind of relationship — with family, with people you grew up with — that is almost impossible to replicate through voluntary adult friendship. Not because voluntary friendship is inferior. Because the trust that comes from having known each other before you had anything to perform is structural. It cannot be built quickly, regardless of good faith.

Enough, Not More

I am not indifferent to money or comfort. I want to not be anxious about rent, to be able to travel when I want to, to have options. But I have noticed that the marginal value of additional material security, past a reasonably comfortable threshold, is much lower than the culture around me tends to imply. The apartment in a better neighbourhood, the car, the status upgrade — these things are more expensive in non-material terms than they appear. They require more time, more commitment, more alignment with paths that lead away from some of the other things on this list.

The concept of enough is not widely respected in the environments I have worked in. Ambition is the default virtue. Wanting less than you could get is treated as a failure of drive. I have made peace with being an exception to this. Knowing approximately where enough is — and not reflexively upgrading it every time it is reached — seems like one of the more useful things I have figured out.

What Is Still Unresolved

The tensions I have not resolved are real. Intellectual freedom and professional legibility pull in different directions. The desire for roots — somewhere that feels like home in a non-provisional way — and the desire to keep exits open are not fully compatible. Caring about effectiveness and impact while also accepting that most individual effort is not historically consequential requires holding two views simultaneously that resist being held simultaneously.

I do not think these tensions resolve cleanly. I think a good life, in the version I am working toward, is one in which they stay live — where I have not settled the question of roots by simply staying put, or settled the question of ambition by simply giving up on it, or settled the question of meaning by subscribing to someone else's framework for what meaningful work looks like.

That is probably not a satisfying summary. It is where I actually am.