But the belittling of female pleasure isn’t funny. It’s a constant in everyday life and perpetuates the idea that women are not capable of thinking and experiencing life at the same level that men do. It pushes the idea of the overly emotional, hysterical woman who isn’t capable of understanding the “socio-economic state of the world,” and it’s a problem.

I think there are some arguments to be made against the pumpkin spice latte which are very much valid. Yes, it is a hype product, and I am not a fan of spending $10 on a drink either. But while men spending thousands on expensive cars for their enjoyment are usually seen as passionate about their hobbies, women’s pleasures are more readily dismissed as shallow or frivolous. A used car would do just as well.

The problem isn’t that everyone who makes fun of pumpkin spice lattes consciously believes women are inferior, but that these jokes draw on a stereotype in which stereotypically feminine interests are treated as inherently shallow. Meanwhile, when it comes to male pleasure, the same scrutiny usually seems to be missing, and the banality of their desires does not take away from the consensus that men are rational, intelligent human beings.

I don’t need to tell anyone reading this that women are at a disadvantage in society and that sexism is very much real. All you need to do to convince yourself of that is to look around and consider who is taking on the care work, working lower-paying jobs, who is being killed due to their gender and who is being hyper-sexualized in everyday media. But it’s easy to forget that even seemingly small side comments, such as teasing the enjoyment of a seasonal drink, feed into the rhetoric that women are intellectually inferior to men. Not every joke is made with sexist intentions, but that doesn’t mean it can’t reinforce sexist ideas.

Which is why you should stop teasing pumpkin spice lattes. It’s sexist.

It’s not that I’m stagnating completely. I’ve taken a couple of online courses (highly recommend Introduction to Psychology by Yale x Coursera), and I’m learning a lot simply by existing in a new environment. But I miss the academic aspect of learning. The studying part. Taking notes, revising, asking questions. Honestly, even the quizzes and feedback.

To combat this lack of input my first instinct was heavily influenced by the current media of creating a personal curriculum. You know, a rigid plan that tells you when and what to learn. So, like the good Gen Z girl I am, I went over to ChatGPT and asked it to create a plan for me.

At first glance, what I was presented with didn’t look too bad. A nice combination of the topics I had listed: philosophy, neuroscience, maths, political concepts, music, feminism. But once I actually started reading and watching what the AI had suggested I consume, I hit a wall almost immediately.

I simply wasn’t intrigued. The videos, though informative, weren’t compelling to me because they defied everything I thought was cool about not being in school anymore.

I hadn’t been able to choose what I wanted to watch, read and learn about. I was literally following a computer’s syllabus, and I lowkey hated that idea.

It just didn’t make any sense to actively stunt my curiosity by letting AI decide what I should engage with.

I realized a rigid schedule isn’t the only way to learn. The content I consume, the time I devote to learning and whether or not I study what I consume despite it not being necessary for a final grade are things that are completely in my control.

I want to be someone who learns and knows stuff. I want to be an interesting person and have something to say at the dinner table.

So, at the beginning of this week, I started devoting somewhere between thirty minutes and an hour each morning to letting my curiosity take me wherever it wanted. I watched YouTube videos, read Substack articles, listened to podcasts, and while doing so actually took notes and reviewed them. I called it curiositymaxxing.

It’s probably the best thing I’ve come up with in months. It makes me feel alive and curious and eager to learn. A feeling I had missed a lot.

The goal is to relight the flame of curiosity, win back the passion of digging and reignite some of that academic weaponry that was lost after graduation by actually writing down the things you’ve learned.

And the best part is that there are absolutely no rules. You are your own boss.

I encourage anyone who ready this to give curriositymaxing a try themseves. To become a little more curious, a little more knowledgeable, and lowkey a bad-er bitch.

Love, Zoe

I fear, my life has turned into a sort of parody of Every Breath You Take by The Police, and I am not a fan.

There is this feeling I used to experience every so often, when an emotion consumed my entire being, and I felt absolutely alive. I would literally get chills all over my body and ask the universe how I could be so blessed to live the life I did.

I used to have those types of moments. But recently I have felt like my brain has become more of a content-producing machine and less of a human being. I experience something absolutely wonderful, but instead of really indulging in the feeling, I automatically feel the need to capture it, process it and turn it into a product.

It’s frustrating, because I do really like being alive, but I’ve been having a hard time getting rid of that hyperanalytic quality my brain seems to have acquired.

Obviously, I have been pondering the question of what might have brought me here. While desperately searching for an answer, I stumbled upon the question of whether journaling might be feeding that content-producing cycle of not living in the moment.

The second life

The internet has created a strange second version of our lives. It’s almost like there is the life we live and the life we pretend to have, which we create online. Those two lives aren’t the same, but it seems as though we try our best to merge them.

When we go somewhere beautiful, we simultaneously experience it, photograph it, think about posting it, and imagine how other people will interpret it. I would argue that that happens even if we don’t have an active social media presence.

Because I fear the mere possibility of posting something can change the experience.

That does not have to be a bad thing. In some way, aiming to document something can make you notice more, and it can make you pay attention, because you know you’ll want all the details when you write about it.

But at what point does paying attention to your life become watching yourself perform it?

The content brain

Since I’ve started writing publicly, my brain has become increasingly good at turning any experience into potential material. My life has literally turned into a pool of content ideas. But that’s an absurd way to live.

Having every event become potentially narratable might seem creatively useful at first, but it also flattens the experience.

It puts our minds elsewhere. There is a reason why every year my New Year’s Resolution is to be more present: a moment becomes valuable because it is interesting enough to describe to other people, instead of being valuable because it is actually my life that’s simply depressing.

We stop living for ourselves and start living to be perceived by other people. Life becomes a performance instead of something to enjoy and experience.

Journaling: reflection or surveillance?

Traditionally, journaling is supposed to help you understand yourself. And that is what it has done for me for almost a third of my life.

You experience something. Let it settle in. Then you write about it.

Writing creates distance, and distance enables reflection. That’s the ideal. You are able to understand what’s going on inside of you and can sort out your thoughts.

It’s amazing, as long as it doesn’t turn into hyper-reflection:

Why am I feeling this? What does this say about me? Why did I react that way? Is this growth? A pattern? A downward spiral? What’s going on?

That’s not productive. It’s a sign you’re not connecting with yourself or staying true to yourself.

I am a huge fan of reflecting. Otherwise, I wouldn’t journal as much as I do. But that’s self-monitoring. You’re no longer simply having an emotion. You’re watching yourself have an emotion.

The problem with turning everything into a story

As humans, we naturally make narratives. We want to know what things mean. We talk to others about our experiences. We write, we think, we overthink. And that is amazing.

But we have to keep in mind that real life is messier than what we come up with in our heads. And not every experience has a lesson. Some things just happen. Maybe they are part of a larger journey, but maybe they aren’t. And I’m pretty sure that not every day is meant to be a lesson for personal growth.

Sometimes you just have a bad day.

I myself have fallen into the trap of narrating my life millions of times. I love the experience of the story, and I love thinking about what things might mean (I guess that’s why I started this Substack).

But I value being a human so much. And I value being present.

Remembering a performance

I just entered a very finite chapter of my life. Half a year in Cameroon. I know the starting date, and I know the end date. That creates a strange temptation to document everything. Because how else will I be able to remember when I’m grey and old?

You know how it goes: if there isn’t a picture, it didn’t happen.

There is something wonderful about wanting to remember and wanting to be able to return to a past state of mind. But if I’m constantly trying to preserve a moment, am I actually making the most of it?

The way publishing changes the voice

Since starting this Substack, I’ve noticed that even when I journal for myself and have no intention of sharing any of it with the world, I’ve ever so slightly changed the way I write. I pay more attention to making my sentences sound eloquent and my spelling somewhat acceptable. I speak a bit less bluntly, and it’s almost like I’m faking my voice.

Obviously, I am more aware of the way I sound when I actually spend time improving my wording in my posts. And I don’t think there is any harm in improving your vocabulary and grammar. The issue is how I change my phrasing and thereby perform for myself.

No one is reading my journal, and yet I’m performing. That’s messed up.

A journal doesn’t need a hook, a thesis, a clean ending, a lesson or good prose. In fact, I would argue, a clear structure makes a journal worse. It exists to help you understand yourself better, whatever that means for each person.

A journal should give you the option to say something contradictory, embarrassing and completely nonsensical without judgment. To say anything you want.

And even though the internet version of yourself should ideally be as close as possible to the alive one (you know, authenticity and all), the aspect of being 100% free somehow makes a private journal fundamentally different from publishing publicly.

Sadly, in my experience, it’s not that simple. I’ve been having to make a conscious effort to write from the heart when I journal, and that’s really a shame.

Why journaling is still relevant

Even though journaling might encourage you to narrate your life, I’m still a strong advocate for a personal journal.

By having a set place to process emotions and experiences, you naturally end up less in your head for the rest of the day. I sleep better, I think better, and I’m more aware of what I actually believe.

So, I have come up with a few rules that help me minimize the cons:

1. Live first. Interpret later.

2. Ask whether I’m remembering or performing.

3. Let some experiences remain narratively useless.

That way journaling remains valuable to me.

I’m excited (and slightly nervous) to see how this Substack thing will change the way I journal, but I will keep making a conscious effort to stay raw and stop monitoring myself both in my journal and while writing publicly.

Love, Zoe

I want to surround myself with people who are smarter than me.

It sounds admirable. I mean, that’s what you’re supposed to want: people who challenge you and expose you to ideas you have never heard about. Intellectually, you probably do want it. But when you are actually the vastly less knowledgeable one, it doesn’t feel that great anymore.

They make a great argument you hadn’t considered or reference something you have never heard of. And it’s humbling.

All of a sudden, you don’t feel inspired. You feel stupid.

Recently, I found myself surrounded by people who know a lot more than I do, and it didn’t make me feel great about myself. So, I wanted to explore the topic a little more. Because at the end of the day, being surrounded by smarter people is the best way to learn (and I want to learn… a lot)

Knowing less ≠ being less intelligent. I think it’s important to start with this distinction, because intellectual insecurity often comes from confusing knowing more with being more intelligent. But those are not the same thing.

A person can know more about philosophy because they’ve spent years reading and studying philosophy. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they are fundamentally smarter than you.

And, importantly, you don’t even need to be equally intelligent for their knowledge to threaten your self-image. There will always be someone out there who is smarter, and that’s perfectly fine (even if it feels a little uncomfortable).

But here is the thing: Personally, I like being competent. I like being the person who knows stuff and can explain things. And I know part of my identity is built around being “smart.”

So obviously, when someone comes along and changes the hierarchy, my brain tends to interpret it as “I am losing.” Simply because the conversation shifts to a topic I have never heard of. But what exactly am I losing? Nothing.

Their intelligence doesn’t subtract from mine. And their knowledge doesn’t make me less knowledgeable. Yet comparison can make it feel zero-sum, even though we gain so much by talking to “smarter” people.

But there are other ways to approach intelligence, for example, in Ancient Greece. Objectively, Socrates is considered one of the smartest people ever to live. But his intellectual strength did not rely on always having the answer. Instead, he was incredibly comfortable saying, “I don’t know.” And then asking a bunch of questions.

Instead of trying to demonstrate how much he knew, Socrates questioned assumptions, exposed contradictions and kept digging.

To me, this shows that there is an immense difference between an insecure intellectual and a curious intellectual. One asks, “How can I prove that I know enough? While the other asks, “What don’t I know?” Suddenly it’s not about who knows the most, but who is secure enough to explore the most.

In this sense, the logical consequence is that sometimes the smartest person in the room isn’t the one who can answer every question, but the one who isn’t embarrassed to ask one.

When you are impressed by someone’s knowledge, there are two possible reactions:

Comparison and admiration.

While comparison makes their intelligence threatening, the other makes it useful, interesting and inspiring. The external situation hasn’t changed. Only your relationship to it has.

I would argue that we are rarely ever jealous of someone’s knowledge, because acquiring it (though potentially tiring) is usually pretty fun and fulfilling. It is more that we are scared of what someone else’s knowledge says about us. We’re scared of how we will be perceived because we don’t know as much. We don’t want to ask the stupid question or reveal we’ve never heard of something, because we are so afraid of looking dumb.

But that is exactly how we prevent ourselves from expanding our limits. There is really no reason to be afraid of asking questions. Why would you pretend to know something if you have the option to be curious, to learn?

I know it feels vulnerable and sometimes almost humiliating (and I’m not great at this either), but asking is how you will know what people are talking about the next time a topic comes up. It’s the most intellectually productive thing you could possibly do.

The ego wants to appear knowledgeable. Curiosity wants to become knowledgeable.

Intellectual growth doesn’t have to be measured against others. You can also frame it as surpassing your previous self. It sounds cheesy, but you are not competing with the smartest person in the room, but the version of yourself who walked into the room knowing less. If someone knows more than you, you have two options:

Feel diminished by the gap, or close it.

The gap shows you where you have room to grow.

Even though we all know, rationally, being surrounded by “smarter” people is amazing, actually being around people who are significantly more knowledgeable does feel uncomfortable.

And sometimes intellectual humility can become self-deprecation. I myself have fallen into the trap of considering myself stupid and questioning my identity because I knew less.

But just like you shouldn’t think of yourself as stupid because you didn’t know something, you shouldn’t turn every intelligent person into a guru. Someone knowing more than you about one thing doesn’t mean they are all-knowing.

And being willing to learn from someone doesn’t mean surrendering your own judgment. Intellectual humility shouldn’t mean thinking less of yourself; it means being accurate about what you know and what you don’t. That lets you be curious.

Like everything else, feeling confident in your abilities and yourself is a skill. And you can improve that skill by exposing yourself to people who know more. Not people who make you feel worthless. People who make you think: Oh shit. I hadn’t thought about that. You don’t have to perform intelligence around them. Because the worthwhile people understand what you are going through and appreciate curiosity.

So ask, listen, admit when you don’t know.

I still don’t particularly enjoy feeling stupid, and I suspect I’ll have to work on that. But I know feeling stupid isn’t a sign of failure; it’s a sign I’ve found the edge of what I know. And that’s where learning starts.

So, I will try to be the least knowledgeable person in the room every once in a while and protect my ego as little as possible.

Love, Zoe

I think I have developed a small problem with ambition, because sometimes I’m afraid to dream big.

I don’t think this is uncommon. In fact, I think most people feel this way every now and then. We are afraid of disappointing ourselves, of public humiliation due to having the audacity to dream big and of displaying the sheer arrogance we seem to possess to assume we might actually deserve all that.

It’s awkward. And yet, dreaming is one of my favorite activities. I’m an optimist at heart, and I know good things are out there for me. But you will never catch me saying my dreams out loud.

There is this thing that’s been going around online for a few years about being a “lone wolf”, working in secret, doing it on your own and not telling a soul about your ambitions. Very mysterious, very disciplined, and very “watch me disappear for six months and come back ripped af.” For years now I’ve been living by that subconsciously. Not even because I think it’s beneficial, but because I’m afraid to embarrass myself. Apparently, my preferred strategy for achieving my goals is to make sure nobody knows what they are. Genius.

Dreaming big always implies a great risk of failing. It’s much more likely for me to get rejected by Columbia than my local college, and that scares the living shit out of me. So far in life, I’ve been pretty lucky to achieve pretty much everything I’ve ever told people I wanted to do, which sounds impressive until I admit that most of those things were not, in fact, the terrifying dreams I’m talking about here, but more like little sub-dreams. Dreams with a decent chance of success (not the ones trying to ruin my life by making me emotionally vulnerable). And this whole situation puts me in an incredibly uncomfortable place, feeling like everyone expects me to accomplish everything all the time, which is frankly impossible.

You gotta fail every now and then. But I’m scared af of failure. It’s sort of ridiculous, but it’s the kind of scared where my brain starts drafting an entirely new personality to avoid finding out whether I can handle rejection.

But since I know that I only have this one life and I would prefer living it to its fullest, I feel it’s my duty to convince myself that failure is human and perfectly fine. So here goes my attempt at rationally dismantling the idea that I shouldn’t say what I want out loud. Because if no one is going to convince me of this for me, I guess I will have to convince myself.

Argument 1

Ok, so hypothetically speaking, let’s say I tell someone I want to get into an Ivy League. Columbia, for example. I want to attend their philosophy department and live in NYC. There are two possible outcomes:

1. I could get in, in which case I can enjoy the deeply tasteful experience of having been right about myself.

2. I don’t get in, in which case… I don’t get in.

That’s it. No international tribunal will be convened. No one will revoke my citizenship. There will be no emergency press conference announcing that, unfortunately, I was not Ivy material after all (although that would almost be cool again.) Why involve embarrassment?

Embarrassment is basically our brain’s way of saying: Everyone will know.

Know what? That you wanted something and tried? That you thought, for one brief and apparently unforgivable moment, that you might be capable of something difficult? Christ, how humiliating. That’s seriously pathetic. God forbid anyone discovers that I have ambitions.

Argument 2

There is a romantic appeal to doing everything in secret. You work quietly, improve yourself and then, one day, you rise from the dust like a phoenix having miraculously become a beast.

The “lone wolf” fantasy. Its appeal lies in its ability to conveniently remove the possibility of witnesses. Unfortunately, humans are not actually lone wolves. We are social animals and other people are useful. They give advice, introduce you to people, send you opportunities and, most importantly, tell you when you’re being an idiot. Sometimes they can even believe in you when you are temporarily unavailable to perform that function yourself.

Keeping every ambition secret means refusing yourself access to all of that. And for what? To preserve the reputation of a person who has never failed at anything she publicly attempted? What a stunning achievement.

Argument 3

Personally, I have been treating failure as though it proves something about me. If I apply and get rejected, it means I wasn’t good enough. But that’s a very dramatic interpretation of what is, objectively, just information. You have discovered something about reality, which is arguably one of the more useful things a person can discover.

The alternative is to spend your entire life carefully selecting goals you are reasonably certain you can achieve (kind of like the way I have been selecting potential romantic partners, which is another topic I will have to tackle).

Argument 4

The thing is, I’m alive, which means sometimes I’m cringe no matter what. Everyone says something stupid or misjudges a situation every once in a while, or even falls on the steps while accepting an Oscar (and no one thinks Jennifer Lawrence is pathetic). Embarrassment is a given. It’s temporary, and it won’t kill you. It’s simply part of life. Someone will probably remember, and maybe someone will even talk about it for a brief moment. And then everyone will move on because they have their own lives to worry about.

This is perhaps the least (and most) satisfying realization of all: nobody is thinking about you nearly as much as you are. People are busy. They have their own existential crises to manage. No one really cares that much, which is, admittedly, a little insulting, but it is also incredibly freeing.

Closing argument

Some people believe saying your dreams out loud will make them come true, because the universe is listening. They call it manifestation. I don’t know if there really is a greater power in the universe, which is why I don’t know if saying your dreams out loud really makes them more likely to come true on a spiritual level.

But it definitely does something else too. It makes you accountable to your own desire and forces you to admit that this is actually something you want. Once you admit that, you have to decide what you’re going to do about it.

You can still fail. Actually, it’s pretty likely. Not at everything, obviously, but failure is inevitable if you are trying genuinely difficult things. You cannot build a life around avoiding the possibility of looking stupid. At some point, you have to choose between protecting your ego and pursuing the thing you actually want. And by saying your dreams out loud, you can ensure that you won’t fail all alone.

I have come to realize that I only have this one life and that in order to make the most of it I will have to fail every now and then. So I might as well start getting used to it now and increase my chances of living a life I’m truly proud of and happy to live. And if that goes badly, well, at least this time, I’ll have said I was going to try.

Love, Zoe

Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to figure out what it is I want to do with my life. It’s probably one of my least favorite activities. Not because I don’t have ambitions. I have plenty of those. But rather because I don’t know which of my countless ambitions to pursue. At 18, you’re expected to choose what to study, what career you want and where you want to live. And you’re supposed to make these decisions with an absolutely microscopic sample size of your own existence.

But how am I supposed to know what I want from a life I’ve never lived?

The paradox of preference

Our concept of the way choice works normally looks something like “I know what I want, therefore I choose.” But despite my lack of serious life experience, I have gathered that major life decisions often look more like “I have to choose, so hopefully I figure out what I want through this decision.”

That’s totally different.

You might think you want to live alone. Then you do it and realize you miss having people around. Or you might think you want to move abroad. Then you move and discover that what you actually wanted was novelty, not emigration.

Some preferences can only be discovered through experience. You’re choosing between hypotheses about yourself. In theory, I think this should make decisions easier, because a decision means figuring things out instead of creating a rigid plan. But it honestly doesn’t feel quite that easy.

The opportunity-cost problem

Every decision closes some doors.

If you study one subject, you aren’t studying another.

If you move to one country, you aren’t living somewhere else.

If you take one job, you aren’t taking another.

Sure, you could do all of these things at some other point in life, but we are, in fact, mortal beings, which creates a particularly nasty psychological trap: the imaginary alternative. You don’t just experience the life you choose. You can also imagine the life you didn’t. And because you never experience that alternative, it can remain permanently perfect, which is where regret and frustration can come from.

Keeping your options open

I’m still young, and keeping my options open seems wise most of the time. I can try things, travel, take different classes and experiment, because as we established before, it’s impossible to know what you want without trying it out. But at some point, possibility has to become reality (you know, you gotta pick a fig). But choosing one life might mean losing all the others, and deciding to keep your options open and not jump neck-deep into one passion probably closed some doors already.

Kierkegaard and the anxiety of possibility

Kierkegaard’s idea of anxiety isn’t simply fear of something bad happening, but the dizzying awareness of possibility. Because when you choose, you also have to confront everything you’re not choosing. And this gets horribly amplified by the seemingly limitless amount of options some of us lucky ones are confronted with nowadays. We see what feels like every possible life pipeline online. That makes the freedom created by endless choices feel strangely anxiety-inducing.

It’s why I don’t think indecision is always the inability to choose, but the terrifying awareness that there are too many possible selves you could become.

The sunk-cost trap

We can often fall into a trap of not changing our career plan or general life trajectory, because we’ve invested too much time into one thing already. But in an attempt to convince myself of the fact that quitting doesn’t mean failure, I will now lay out why that’s stupid:

Okay, so you’ve studied law for three years, shed countless tears about your exams and now realize that you actually despise the subject. Well, three years have already passed no matter what. You now have a choice to change your life for the better or suffer forever. The choice is yours. You learned that you didn’t want something. That’s not wasted time. That’s knowledge you couldn’t have acquired beforehand.

In John Stuart Mill’s words, you’re emphasizing individuality and “experiments in living,” because figuring out life isn’t necessarily an introspective exercise; it can be an experimental one. So ask yourself: “Knowing what I know now, would I choose this again?” It’s fine to change your path. It’s not a failure.

So should you just choose randomly?

Obviously, you can’t just make enormous decisions with no thought whatsoever. Research matters. Advice matters. Self-reflection matters. Values matter. But there is a limit to how much information you can gather before acting. At some point, analysis becomes another way of avoiding uncertainty. You simply have to experience it, and the illusion of knowing what you want might actually limit you in your ability to choose and create a life you love.

This can be beautifully underlined with existentialism. Due to the fact that you can’t discover a predetermined self and then start making choices, but instead participate in creating yourself through said choices, you don’t need to know exactly who you are before you start living.

It’s impossible to know what you want all the time, and making the right decision might not always be in your control, but your response to it is. So be aware of what you’re experiencing.

The problem with knowing what you want is that you actually can’t know until you’ve tried, which is a little inconvenient when everyone expects you to make life-changing decisions at 18. But I fear we must come to terms with that.

Maybe we’re not supposed to know what we want from our entire life.

Maybe we’re only supposed to know what we’re curious enough to try next.

Because every choice closes some doors, but it also opens one.

Maybe it’s to walk through one, pay attention to what you find, and be willing to change direction.

Love, Zoe

I love journaling. It’s the habit I have been most consistent with, despite never really considering it a habit or something I have to do.

Journaling allows me to understand what I am experiencing and feeling, and I am pretty sure it lets me think better too. Honestly, especially during this crazy period of my life, I think I owe my entire sanity to journaling.

When I was twelve, I read this series of books called “Dork Diaries”. It’s kind of like “Diary of a Wimpy Kid”, just that the main character, Nikki Maxwell, is a girl and apparently, that resonated a lot more.

Nikki is who got me into journaling and I thank her every day.

Inspired by Dork Diaries’ journaling style, I started with little doodles and comic strips, mixed with the type of entries a 12-year-old writes. But pretty quickly I strayed away from that and found that traditional journaling works best for me.

So now, to the great detriment of my book shelf, I spend about twenty minutes to half an hour journaling every evening.

traditional journaling

Recently, journaling has gained a lot of attention. But most of what I see is aesthetic scrapbooks and bullet journals masked as journaling. And despite that being a great way of processing things, it is not what I mean when I talk about journaling.

When I journal, I do not think about what it looks like. I just write.

I simply start by putting down the date and then let my stream of consciousness guide me.

What is especially cool about traditional journaling is that it does not require much time or commitment. You can write where ever you want, whether that means your bed, the sofa, or while sitting by the ocean. And there is no need for scissors and glue to stick little pictures onto the pages (although that can obviously be super cute too).

I journal in the evening because I realised it helps me sleep. A lot.

journaling frees the mind

Like most people, I have a pretty busy life. I am constantly rushing from one place to another and rarely have a minute to process what is going on.

That is, until I lie in bed and want to go to bed, and all of a sudden, processing mode sets in.

Now, obviously there is the option of lying there, wide awake, staring at the ceiling. Thinking until you can finally fall asleep. But I have found that journaling is a lot more effective at getting though all of the unprocessed stuff that piles up across the day.

Journaling lets me get it all out and lets me sort out my own thoughts and emotions, because to be honest, most of the time I do not really know what is going on in my brain either.

I know that if I dedicate those twenty minutes every night to write down what I feel, I will actually be able to sleep well and wake up rested. Instead of spending hours tossing and turning.

For me, the busy lifestyle also comes with an inability to be calm.

journaling forces you to slow down

Journaling is not a fast-paced thing. You have to write down every word, and that will inevitably be slower than saying it out loud (or not thinking about it at all).

But that is not a bad thing. It is actually what makes journaling so special.

When you write, you rethink. You question. And you relax.

Having everything written down in front of you makes it easier to see the bigger picture. And it reminds you that you do not have to have everything figured out yet, because if you wanted to, you could just return to what you have already written down and go over it again.

It’s there forever.

journaling lets you go back in time

If you have journaled for a few years, you know how strange it can feel to read through your old entries. It can almost make you feel uncomfortable.

But what is amazing is that you literally see the personal growth in front of you.

You can feel yourself back into past versions of yourself and re-experience what it was like to go through certain things. It can make you more compassionate towards your past self and more understanding of who you are now.

Contrary to scrolling through your photo gallery from a few years ago, old journal entries give you a raw snapshot of what it felt like to be that person. And to me that is pretty cool.

It can feel intimidating to start journaling. You are forced to confront your own opinions and feelings, but trust me, it is worth it.

You will get to know yourself better and feel more in touch with your emotions.

It takes time to discover what works for you. And maybe it’s not traditional journaling, but something totally different.

The first time you journal will probably feel uncomfortable. You will not know what to say and might almost feel judged by your notebook. But you have to get over that feeling. And maybe you will fall in love with journaling too.

Love, Zoe

Today I was scrolling through Instagram, and I noticed that there is no such thing as having a casual hobby any more. And I don’t mean that people don’t have any hobbies. I just mean that every hobby seems to have to turn into something measurable. We can’t just leave our hobbies alone, practice, have fun and go on with our lives. Everything has to lead somewhere, and it must be turned into a skill.

Casually running turns into a marathon.
Reading turns into a yearly reading goal.
Drawing turns into an Etsy shop.

Why is the hobby itself no longer enough? Why does everything have to go somewhere?

What’s the ROI?

To be honest, this isn’t surprising. I don’t have to tell anyone about the current culture of productivity maxing and constant encouragement to optimize every part of our lives. Time has become something that must justify itself. If you spend three hours doing something, you have to explain what you gained. And happiness is not a viable answer.

To a certain extent, this is completely understandable. In the areas of the world where productivity culture is most prominent, we generally don’t have many life-threatening problems anymore, so we turn to ourselves. And I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing. As humans, it’s natural to want to improve things. To want to solve issues. And self-improvement can have an amazing effect on our lives.

But especially in combination with the capitalist society we live in, it’s no wonder we want to hyper-maximize everything all the time.

The consensus seems to be productive activity = valuable and unproductive activity = wasted time. But do we really want to turn ourselves into numbers?

Self-improvement doesn’t have to mean constant self-optimization. I think the problem isn’t wanting to improve, but feeling like we always have to.

Leisure

Leisure isn’t really a thing anymore. We don’t do things just for their own sake. There is always a bigger picture in mind:

• exercising → become healthier

• reading → become smarter

• meditation → become more focused

• sleeping → improve recovery

• hobbies → improve creativity

Even rest has to be maximized, because it makes you more productive later. Even our free time becomes another tool for productivity.

So, if you’re not working, you’re recovering from work so that you can work again.

But the idea that leisure is valuable isn’t new.

The good life

work → achievement → money → success

That’s what most people think of when they think about a good life. But that wasn’t always how people imagined it. In ancient Greece, the concept of eudaemonia was developed. It’s about living well and developing the capacities that make a human life worthwhile.

Which is why leisure was taken very seriously.

Not laziness or absence of work, but something that can have value in itself.

Which gives us a very different way of thinking about leisure. Maybe the better question is not “what does this produce?” but “what does this allow me to experience?”

There’s a difference between something having instrumental value and something having intrinsic value. Instrumental value means something is valuable because of what it leads to, so the activity itself becomes a means to an end.

But something has intrinsic value simply because it is worth doing in itself. You don’t need it to produce anything else for it to matter. The experience itself is the point.

And I think we’ve become so accustomed to asking what something does for us that we’ve forgotten to ask whether we enjoy doing it, especially with hobbies.

I want the self-improvement life though

But I’m not going to lie, doing something objectively useless terrifies the fuck out of me. At the end of the day, I do want to live up to my potential. So where is the line between fun and laziness?

I constantly find myself torn between two parties. On the one hand, I want to improve; I want to maximize; I want that 5 am morning routine and Oura Ring. But at the same time, I want to go with the flow, feel, live, go a little crazy sometimes. I want that raw human experience. And I have a really hard time finding a middle ground. It always seems to be one extreme or another.

But I don’t think that has to be the case (even though personally, I haven’t found the sweet spot yet). Ambition, discipline and wanting to improve aren’t the enemy. The problem is applying optimization logic to everything, because that can make you lose your human touch. But effort remains a great thing.

Effort ≠ Optimization

Some parts of our lives make sense to optimize. Work, studies, deadlines, responsibilities. These systems are laid out to me to be maximized. But I don’t think that logic needs to follow us everywhere because effort doesn’t mean optimization.

I am a big defender of putting effort into everything you do. Pour your heart and soul into the things you enjoy and want to do. But that doesn’t mean optimizing everything.

Efficiency isn’t always the goal. Doing something yourself can be valuable even when it isn’t faster or easier.

Take the example of writing this Substack. Technically, we could all just give AI a prompt: “write an article about the death of the casual hobby,” and bam, it spits out an article that is potentially better written than anything you could have come up with on a random Saturday afternoon. But instead, most of us choose to write ourselves, because the process is part of the point. We put in effort even though we could optimize the process. And that’s a good thing.

That way we can take a hobby seriously and actually be devoted to it without taking the outcome all too seriously.

You can care deeply about something without needing to maximize it.

You can get better at something without making “getting better” the entire point of doing it.

A healthy escape

There are very few places we can escape optimization, especially because such a large part of our lives is consumed by work. But hobbies offer us a unique chance to do just that. They can exist outside the productive system, because they don’t need measurable progress, mastery or monetization. You can practice because you enjoy practicing. Improvement is obviously fun, but not necessary and with hobbies, improvement can exist without optimization.

Hobbies are one of the few places where we can practice doing something without asking what it gives us.

And I think that’s exactly what we need them for.

But it’s aesthetic though

For some reason, we find unoptimized things incredibly beautiful and intriguing, which became even more obvious during the niche and chic trends. The slightly chaotic aesthetic of a messy bookshelf, cigarettes and handwritten notes seems to be appealing to us. And I think that’s because they make us feel human and act as an expression of our freedom. We’re drawn to things that prove that we were alive, that we left something behind and that we were real people. Not just robots.

Our humanity is what makes us unoptimized, which is why constantly optimizing and controlling our lives in a helicopter-parent way takes away from what makes us human. It makes us feel like a project rather than a person.

And being bad at a hobby can be part of that charm.

So, maybe the goal isn’t to stop improving, but to have parts of your life where improvement isn’t the point.

I think we need some things to go nowhere. Some things to be messy. And some things that we can just do for their sake.

Because effort doesn’t mean optimization, and useless doesn’t mean worthless.

Not everything needs to be justified, but if you really need a justification, maybe let “I like it” or “It’s fun” slide every once in a while.

Because not everything has to make us better; at the end of the day, we’re just on a floating rock. So make art, love, laugh and enjoy the fuck out of this adventure.

Love, Zoe

Autumn. It’s arguably the best time of the year. The leaves start turning, turtlenecks are pulled out of the back of the closet, temperatures drop, and you feel a sudden urge to grab a heavy mug and an almost involuntary impulse to press play on the Gilmore Girls pilot.

But I don’t think we’re just rewatching because it’s a comfort show. I think we are retreating into an analog time capsule because our modern, digital realities feel more like a Formula 1 track than a life sometimes.

Every September without fail, the Internet tries to sell us the “Fall Reset”. How about starting your winter arc now? We are handed digital checklists for morning routines and aesthetic stationery to organize our goals. And yet we all gravitate toward our favorite cozy autumn show and feel the urge to hit the brakes, at least for 42 minutes a day. Although super convenient, our heroin-esque mobile phone dependence and resulting state of being constantly reachable tends to be exhausting. Our minds are flooded with input at almost every second of every day. If it’s not while scrolling through aesthetic workout routines and stalking other people’s supposed lives, it’s the Duolingo notification that the owl is sad again because you are simply not practicing enough French (god). Or the invisible pressure of LinkedIn updates, constantly hovering over us like a dark rain cloud, ready to burst any second. It’s a lot. So, it’s really no wonder that most of us jump at the opportunity of escapism once the season starts to change.

There is something about the landlines hanging on the walls, heavy paperbacks, uncurated living rooms (excluding Emily, obviously), flannels and coffee cups that actually look hot that make us feel physically nostalgic. The 2000s setting matters a lot and is arguably what makes the show so intriguing. It was an era where characters could actually get lost, miss a plan, and not know where their friends were every second, because there simply was no Find My. The possibility of being off the grid is appealing, because as young adults we have never experienced it, and the Gilmore Girls let us live vicariously through them.

Stars Hollow exists in a world of low-stakes crisis. It’s comforting to watch a show where the worst thing to have happened in a long time is Taylor wanting to open an Old Dutch-style candy shop next to Luke’s, when current concerns center more around wars and our planet burning up. Somehow every problem can be neatly solved, never to be addressed again in 42-minute resolutions. And the outfits, conversations and plot lines of the show reflect that exact vibe. It’s an enjoyable contrast.

But it’s not just about the coziness. Notice how no one in Stars Hollow is tracking their habits on an app or optimizing their morning routine? They’re just drinking coffee out of oversized mugs, walking through crunchy leaves, and being unapologetically themselves. The show offers an antidote to the Fall Reset and reassures you that there is no need to have everything figured out just because the leaves are changing.

If you are anything like me, you started watching Gilmore Girls when you were about twelve or maybe thirteen, and your biggest role model was Rory. An academic weapon, with neat semester paths and the aesthetic of perfection. Chased by attractive guys because of her brains and ability to be so captivated by Moby Dick that she completely missed the fistfight in front of her (yeah, I thought Dean was cool back then). It was inspiring. And I will admit that I read one or the other book more, because I felt so drawn to her character.

But just like so many others, growing up and rewatching the show made me realize that Rory is pretty fucking flawed too. She’s just a girl, trying to adhere to everyone’s expectations and figuring things out as she goes. Neither Rory nor Lorelai nor any other character on the show is perfect. They all make mistakes all the time. And watching fictional characters make massive career and relationship blunders helps us forgive our own real-life stumbles.

At the end of the day, we don’t keep returning to the Gilmore Girls because we want to live in a fictional New England town forever. We go back because it acts as a soft landing pad. It’s a monument to the caffeinated chaos of trying your best and occasionally face-planting along the way. We’re allowed to log off, step away from that empty planner and ignore the winter arc for a while. So let the Duolingo owl cry for a day and remember that figuring things out slowly doesn’t mean you’re failing. You just need to take the occasional sip of coffee, put on a cute outfit and take one step at a time.

Love, Zoe

You are trying to find yourself.

Somehow we are all trying to find ourselves.

We say it when we graduate, when we move somewhere new, when a relationship ends, and when we simply don’t know what to do with our lives. So we take personality tests, make vision boards and journal about our “purpose,” hoping to find out what we really want.

An entire industry is built around helping us discover ourselves.

Because I suppose there is something incredibly comforting about this idea. If there is a real me somewhere hidden underneath, then all I have to do is find her. It’s not my job to decide who I want to be. All I have to do is discover who I already am.

But lately, I have been questioning that. And I’ve been wondering if there really is a me to discover, or if I’m instead shaped by what I choose?

The idea of finding yourself depends on there being a fixed self. Something we are born with. Basically determinism.

And that is completely understandable and a plausible way of thinking.

After all, we already accept that some parts of us are given. I mean, how many things about ourselves did we really choose? I didn’t choose my insecurities, I didn’t choose where I was born, and I definitely didn’t choose to have an existential crisis every two weeks.

Even when I think about things I believe to be within my control. Like choosing to follow my passions or choosing to connect with certain people, I have to ask myself where those choices came from. What caused them?

Why do I like the music I like? And why do I want the career I want?

If everything that happens has a prior cause, then maybe our decisions also result from prior causes.

And those prior causes result from prior causes. And those prior causes result from even earlier causes. And so on and so on.

That’s determinism.

It’s the hypothesis that the circumstances preceding an action (like natural laws, heredity, past experiences, and desires) make that specific action inevitable and rule out any other possibility.

Maybe “I chose this” is sometimes a shorthand for “this is what everything that happened before led me to choose.”

And suddenly, “finding yourself” starts to look a little different.

But we feel like we are choosing when we make decisions.

We consider pros and cons and try to predict the outcome and effects of our choices.

In some way, it feels like we can do what we want, but cannot determine what we want. We can decide whether to eat the cake. But we cannot decide whether we want the cake. The same goes for relationships, the career we pursue, and the dreams we chase.

And that’s pretty much Schopenhauer’s argument:

Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.

It seems as though we can choose our actions to some degree, but our desires are simply there. They appear before we even get to make a decision consciously.

That creates an uncomfortable question:

If we don’t choose what we want, how much can we really claim ownership over what we choose and who we are?

“Finding yourself” now becomes almost paradoxical. We are told to look inward and discover what we truly want. But what if the person doing the looking is already the product of things she never chose?

But for me, determinism has one huge issue.

If everything we do is predetermined, do we even have to take responsibility for our actions? Wouldn’t that be unfair towards the person who did something wrong, because that person didn’t actually choose their behaviour?

Regardless of whether determinism is true, we still have to deal with responsibility. Circumstances constrain us, but we still have to act. We still have to decide what to do next.

So, we are left with a practical problem:

We have to live as choosing beings.

This is where I think existentialism becomes useful. Not necessarily because it proves that we are completely free, but because it refuses to let us sit around waiting to discover what we are supposed to be.

The existentialists argue that existence precedes essence. Unlike objects, we were not created with a certain goal or meaning in mind. There is no God to guide us or tell us what to do.

The modern version of “finding yourself” often tells us to look inward for an answer. Existentialism turns the question around: to find yourself, you have to actually make decisions and participate in creating yourself.

We are condemned to freedom.

We cannot escape the fact that we have to choose, and our choices help shape who we are.

That means there isn’t necessarily a fixed “you” underneath everything. We give ourselves meaning. We decide who we are and who we want to be. That can be freeing and frightening at the same time. Because it eliminates the idea that we need to find out who we are before deciding what to do.

But a pure existentialist freedom can sometimes sound almost obnoxious.

You are free! Do whatever you want! Just choose differently!

When we look at our world, it becomes clear that this is very much not true. People are limited in their actions. Circumstances do shape what people choose to do and what they are able to do.

But even within our circumstances, freedom exists. There is always some alternative. Some other path we could choose.

In her theory of radical freedom, Simone de Beauvoir argues that even though you are never choosing from an infinite menu, you are choosing from the position you have been given. Freedom exists within a situation, rather than outside of it. There is always a way out (and a quite drastic one in her most famous publication, if you want to Google it)

I think this is a much more realistic version of “finding yourself.”

You don’t uncover yourself. You sort of interact with yourself.

That means freedom may not be the absence of causes, but the ability to respond to them.

We don’t know whether the universe is deterministic.

At the end of the day, we don’t know if our choices are really ours. But we do know that we have to live as though our choices matter.

Because here is the problem:

Maybe every decision you make is the inevitable result of genetics, environment, psychology, previous experiences and countless causes stretching backward.

We might never be able to prove otherwise.

And yet:

You still wake up tomorrow and decide whether to go to work.

Whether to call someone.

Whether to apologise.

Whether to become kinder.

And those choices don’t just reveal who you are. They help create who you are.

Your choices do not need to be absolutely free to become meaningful. They shape your life and affect the people around you. That should be enough for them to matter.

I think we should stop wasting our lives trying to dig up an authentic version of ourselves.

It’s not that we shouldn’t get to know ourselves. But maybe we get to know ourselves by consciously choosing our actions. It means becoming more aware of who we want to be and how that might be compatible with who we are right now.

Maybe the question “Who am I?” is less useful than “Who am I becoming?”

Existentialism tells us that nothing is set in stone.

Nothing is God-given.

And we get to do with that whatever we want.

So, no. I guess I don’t want to find myself.

Love, Zoe

I have wasted an embarrassing amount of my life scrolling. Not because I particularly enjoy it. Or because I even remember what I watched.

But because it is so horribly easy.

I get home, lie down on my bed, reach for my phone, and automatically start scrolling.

Five minutes turn into thirty.

Thirty turn into an hour.

And eventually I look at the time and realise I have just spent the last ninety minutes watching strangers live lives that are, frankly, not mine.

And I do not want that. I don’t want to spend my one life consuming other people’s lives. I want to know things.

I want to speak languages, travel, ask questions, read books from foreign countries, learn about maths, politics, philosophy and actually connect with where I am. I want to be curious.

Basically, I want to be a cool person.

And I have recently become convinced that one of the best ways to become one is quite simple: Learn a language.

I already speak German, Spanish, and English, and am currently trying to perfect my French — and the more I learn, the more convinced I become that language learning is about so much more than vocabulary and grammar.

You know, learning a language isn’t just about becoming multilingual — it’s about becoming a more curious, capable human being.

So here is why you should most definitely start learning a language today:

Own your brain.

In this digital day and age, there are very few things we actually own. We stream our movies on Netflix, borrow our music from Spotify, and plan our life on a digital calendar owned by Google. But one thing that will always stay your own is the knowledge you possess.

It belongs to you.

Learning a language is one of those low-effort, high-reward things where you can literally see and feel the progress.

Even if you only spend fifteen minutes a day studying your chosen language, you have tangible evidence that you have, in fact, learned something new in the number of words you know and sentences you are now able to form.

And if you ask me, that’s super cool.

Think better.

If you’ve ever thought something along the lines of “why does this make sense to others and I can’t seem to wrap my head around it?”, language learning might help you with that. Because it doesn’t only change the way you feel; it actually changes the way you think.

Learning a new language physically rewires your brain through neuroplasticity, building denser gray matter and stronger neural connections.1

That means that it literally improves your thinking skills and lets you make connections that you weren’t able to make before, because you simply did not have the neural connection to do so. Isn’t that insane?

It also helps undo the damage we have done to our attention spans. Learning new languages lets you stay focused for longer periods of time without getting distracted.

And obviously that also translates to other parts of your life.

In addition to physically rewiring your brain, you will also notice how another language forces you to see ideas from a different perspective and makes you aware of how language shapes humour, emotions, and relationships. This will let you actually use those new connections you created in your brain.

Expand your world.

Comfort is obviously comforting. And it can be easy to become caught up in what you already know (I talked about this in another post of mine. It’s linked at the bottom, so feel free to check it out). The language, culture, and habits that are familiar to you make things feel simple. But if you limit yourself to one tiny little bubble, it shrinks the world and can become claustrophobic.

By learning a new language, you will automatically immerse yourself in a new culture. You will gain access to books, films, music, jokes, conversations, and communities that would have otherwise remained foreign and unknown to you. And you might even find a new safe space along the way.

A language will enrich your horizon and make you feel like you’re a part of something bigger.

If you can, you might travel to a different country where the language is spoken and be able to communicate beyond the tourist level. But even without travel, another language can bring a new culture into your everyday life — I mean, what is social media good for if not for that?

Connect.

Now, if you can travel, speaking even a little bit of someone’s language can break down barriers and thereby let you properly get in touch with the local lifestyle. It will make you able to encounter people with more respect and style.

People always appreciate effort more than perfect grammar. So don’t be intimidated to speak.

Language learning encourages you to listen and ask questions. It lets you be comfortable in not knowing everything yet, and that is what sparks real conversation and connection.

Not only can you connect through travel, but you can connect with fellow language learners. Join a class, join an internet chat, or reach out to people who are on the same journey as you. You can even go to your local library and see if you stumble into a fellow learner in the foreign languages section. It can be super encouraging to learn with others, and we could all use a little more community in our lives, right?

Do not fear failing.

Aren’t we all scared of failing and making a fool of ourselves?

We’ll the cool thing about learning a new language is that embarrassment is inevitable, so you might as well get over that fear right now.

You will make mistakes. You will forget the most basic words and sound horribly awkward. But that does not matter.

Over time, you will learn that being a beginner is not something to be scared of or avoid. It’s actually the best thing ever, because it allows you to grow and improve.

Not being afraid to embarrass yourself is a skill that has to be learned and a damn important one at that.

The confidence and resilience you develop reach beyond language learning and make you an overall more capable person.

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Trust the compound effect.

Believe me, learning a language will not happen overnight. It takes years to properly master. But just ten minutes a day can become hundreds of hours over the course of several years. And the small consistent efforts you put in will eventually create a skill that is impossible to build without consistency.

Language learning will force you to think more long term and not expect instant results which is particularly important nowadays, where our dopamine receptors are outrageously overloaded by short form content.

What’s cool as well is that once you learn your first language, learning even more languages will become easier. You now have a language learning system in place and already have some new neurological connections made. You will notice how your brain gets faster at recognising similarities between words, which will make learning a lot faster and easier.

What is a time problem?

Adding on to the last paragraph, language learning does not necessarily require huge amounts of time. It’s about consistent effort. And remember: the actual storing of information happens while you sleep, so don’t neglect that.

Ten minutes of vocabulary, a podcast while walking, or watching a movie with subtitles all count as studying and bring you closer to your goal.

It’s not necessary to create a whole new life around learning a new language, and frankly that’s unrealistic for most people. Instead, try to integrate the language into your existing life and let it enrich your days.

Become a person who learns.

Ultimately, language learning is about curiosity. It reminds you that you are capable of starting from zero, and it creates a habit of seeking unfamiliar things instead of staying inside your little bubble.

You prove to yourself that you can, in fact, learn. That you are a smart, capable person and that mistakes are nothing to be afraid of. And it will be fun too.

You will probably never feel ready to start something new, so start now.

It’s not about choosing the perfect language or coming up with the ultimate learning schedule. Choose a language you are genuinely curious about and learn the first few words today.

A year from now, you can either still be thinking about learning a language — or you can be someone who speaks one.

So start now and give it a go. Let’s learn and grow together!

Love, Zoe

here’s the post I mentioned in “expand your world”

Oh, so you are amateur girl? — hm.

Entering a room you have never been in is awkward. And personally, I have the automatic inclination to apologise for it.

“Sorry, I’m new here”

Why am I apologising?

Why would it be a bad thing to be new? Am I not just learning, and shouldn’t that be a good thing? — Wrong. You should be an expert.

Think about the people we look up to. High achievers, people who are productive and have their lives together. Experts. Not necessarily people who go: “I started something that I am currently terrible at”.

We only really see and celebrate the finished product. Not the way someone got there.

A highlight reel of mastery.

I fear, the internet is making this phenomenon a lot worse. Everyone on social media is trying to be an expert in their field. But odds are most people have no idea what they are talking about and are faking it as they go.

All you see online is someone’s finished painting, someone’s perfectly decorated apartment, someone’s career success, and someone else’s fluent language skills.

The messy middle usually gets compressed into a before-and-after transformation. Because why on earth would you choose to expose yourself?

This portrayal of expertise does something to our expectations and leaves us feeling pathetic if we were not able to “become fluent in two months” or “grow our following from zero to a million in a week and a half.” It feels like a humiliation ritual.

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Being a beginner means being visibly incompetent.

Nowadays, most things feel like a performance. Living has somehow become a brand. Everyone is either dark academia, granola, or scandi.

So if you don’t just drink coffee — you have a coffee aesthetic,

and you don’t just read books — you have a bookshelf aesthetic,

then it is no wonder that nobody wants to be a beginner any more — I mean, what’s cool about being an incompetent girl? At the end of the day, people seem to think that you are what you look like.

Of course we will start performing competence. The aesthetics obviously do not just stay within the constraints of our phones.

At work we are proactive.

At university we take initiative.

On social media we have a niche.

And in our everyday lives we obviously know who we are.

Everyone is constantly expected to have an opinion, a five-year plan and a morning routine. And preferably, everything should look effortless.

That is the problem. It’s not enough to be figuring something out. You need to look like someone who already figured it out.

This leads to the conclusion that we are not actually afraid of failing. We are afraid of looking like we are inexperienced. Because being a beginner is visible.

When did “I don’t know” become embarrassing?

Even though I think our fear of looking like we do not know something is connected to the way social media currently works, it is also deeply ingrained in our society and upbringing.

Think about school. How many times did you not raise your hand because you were not one hundred percent sure your answer was right? For me, that was a daily occurrence.

We were rewarded for correct answers and criticised for mistakes, even though mistakes would have probably been more effective for remembering the right answer in the long run.

We are taught to raise our handy when we know and not when we have an interesting question to add. Eventually, most of us learn to remain quiet rather than admit we do not know something.

After years of being trained to give the right answer, it comes as no surprise that as adults we squirm to look smart.

Even if that means missing out on personal growth through learning something new.

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The weird shame of asking for help

Not only do beginners look stupid, but they need help too. But asking for help can feel like a two-for-one embarrassment. You are force you to admit your incompetence and feel like you are inconveniencing everyone around you.

So you end up saying things like “I should know this” or “This is probably a stupid question”. But I think we are confusing self-sufficiency with competence. At some point, everyone had to ask for help, and everyone relates to the feeling of being a beginner.

Everyone was a beginner once

Every person who is exceptional at something now was once terrible at it.

Every fluent speaker once knew two words.

Every professor once had their first lesson.

And every writer once wrote something stupid.

We tend to remember people’s expertise and not their beginnings.

But what if we respected the beginner stage?

Being a beginner could be something valuable rather than embarrassing.

Instead of feeling like asking for help is an inconvenience, we could see it as an homage of respect and admiration towards the work someone else has put into perfecting their skill.

Being a beginner means:

you’re curious

you’re willing to be uncomfortable

you’re learning

you’re changing

you’re doing something you’ve never done before.

That is cool and not something to be embarrassed about or scared of.

I am currently finding myself in several beginner stages, and even though being a beginner is uncomfortable at times, it is also incredibly rewarding. I love going to bed every night, knowing that I put myself out there and learned something new.

So maybe being a beginner is not the embarrassing part.

Maybe pretending not to be one is.

Love, Zoe

P.S.: If this was useful to you in any way or you enjoyed reading, consider restacking and/or subscribing. I’m just at the beginning of my substack journey, and it really helps me out!

There is a particular kind of embarrassment that comes with learning a language: I will have the perfectly formed thought of what I want to say, but somewhere between my brain and mouth it will get lost completely. All of a sudden I’m desperately trying to think of a word that I definitely know, stammering, mixing up grammar, wondering whether the person I am talking to has any idea what I am saying.

It is humbling, to say the least. And, if I am being honest, I am not very good at being bad at things.

You see, I like being good at things. I like understanding a concept right away, and I like explaining things to others. Being good at something is comfortable, but language learning puts you right back at the beginning. Now I am the person who does not understand, who needs things repeated, who has an accent and who sounds much less intelligent than they actually are. And that does not go away, at least not for a while.

I had forgotten how vulnerable it feels to be bad at something in public.

The whole concept of language learning makes it impossible to hide. There are many things you can practice privately. You can learn to draw alone, exercise alone and research something alone. But not language.

You can study in private for some time, but sooner or later you will have to let someone hear you because language is social.

One of the most frustrating things while speaking is the gap between knowing and being able to do something. I know the grammar, and I have hundreds of words memorized. But when I am supposed to use what I know, my brain seems to shut down completely.

This is not even the first language I have learned (French is actually my fourth language), but I seem to have repeatedly repressed that insane discomfort I feel when I have to do something I have not yet perfected. I keep catching myself wanting to jump ahead magically. You know, skip the whole embarrassing part of being a beginner and be the person who understands jokes and sounds confident right away.

But not only is it obviously impossible, but it should also be undesirable.

Being bad at something is forcing me to grow as a person. So why would I want to skip the version of myself who is bad at something, if that means I stagnate?

I am kind of a hyper beginner at everything, and maybe that is what this stage of life is about.

When looking at the larger season of my life, language learning has made me realize that moving out is a pretty similar experience.

I am still pretty new to adulting, a beginner adult, some might say. I am still learning how much groceries cost, how to manage the household, how to organize my time, and how to actually make my place feel like a home.

I continuously make mistakes in every aspect of my life, and that feels very intimidating at times.

I’ve been treating the mistakes I make as evidence that I am not good at something, and in some sense that is true. I am not yet good at speaking the new language.

But actually it is evidence that I am participating in the process. If I am making mistakes in another language, I am actually using that language. And if I am making mistakes while trying something new, I am actually trying something new.

That basically just means I am being a good beginner.

Failure means I’m bad at this, so I should not do it. But being a beginner is being bad at something because I have not learned it yet. Those are two completely different things.

We often think that confidence is necessary to try something new, but I think it is really the other way around. Confidence is the residue, not the prerequisite: I try, I survive being bad, I get slightly better, and therefore I become more confident.

At the end of the day, getting over your mistakes is what will make you more confident. The goal is not to become someone who is never bad at anything, but to become someone who can sound stupid and keep speaking, make mistakes and try again. That’s cool.

I am starting to consider that learning is not about becoming good at a thing, but more about becoming comfortable in not being the best.

I still get embarrassed. I still forget the words. And god knows I still make mistakes.

But every day I am becoming less desperate to hide them.

Love, Zoe

When I was a little girl, it seemed so incredibly cool to have my own place and my own furniture with pillows I picked on a sofa I bought. The freedom, I thought, would feel exhilarating. Magical. But now that I am actually faced with the reality of packing my life into boxes, I have to admit: this feels a lot scarier than I expected.

In a week, I am moving out for the first time. And while most of my friends are moving somewhere more or less close to home, I decided it would be best to move to an entirely different continent. Yaounde, Cameroon, to be exact.

I have always been someone who loved to explore. To take the route less travelled by and strive for an Anthony Bourdain kind of lifestyle. But to be honest, I am horribly freaked out about this move. And it makes me wonder:

Wouldn’t it be better to just stick to what I know?

the junk drawer

Do you have a junk drawer at home? One full of paper clips, cards, a magnet you brought from that trip you went on three years ago, and old crayons from when you decided you wanted to get into art. I sure have one. And about once every two months I tell myself that the time has come to declutter that thing and toss out everything I don’t use. But for some reason I never actually get rid of anything.

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My usual excuse is that I simply don’t feel like cleaning it out. It’s too much work. I’m too lazy. But I don’t actually think that’s the real reason why I don’t declutter.

I think it’s more liekly that I am hanging on to past versions of myself.

Versions that feel comforting and easy to fall back on. If I don’t throw these dried-up crayons away, I might still come back to drawing, right? It’s easier to blame laziness than to accept the fact that I have changed and that there are some things I didn’t do and probably won’t do any more.

I feel similarly about moving out.

comfort zone maxing

I’m still young. 19 years old and no real responsibilities. If I wanted to, I could continue living at home for a few years, and nobody would poke an eye.

I could go to university in my hometown and continue having my parents cook for me and wash my clothes. And is comfort really that bad? I mean, we only have one life. Why is the conclusion always to challenge yourself? Can’t comfort make you happy just as well (if not better)?

In my limited experience, I have concluded that there is actually no such thing as unlimited comfort.

At some point you get uncomfortable within your comfort.

You see, I graduated from high school a few months ago and have been living a life of comfort. Granted, I worked and travelled a bit, but I lived an incredibly comfortable life at home. Just that I got bored, and not in a good way.

I know that boredom can be a good thing. It can lead to ideas and bring out your creativity, but the kind of boredom I experienced was more of a thirst for life. I felt like I was drowning in what I already knew and compensating by spending a ridiculous amount of time scrolling through reels, living vicariously through strangers online. Flooding myself with lifeless input and slowly losing myself in my imaginary, comfortable world. Kind of like the way you jam more and more stuff into your junk drawer and end up not being able to find absolutely anything in there.

And slowly I was becoming uncomfortable in my attempt at comfort-maxing.

The weird thing about all of this is that I like to believe that I know myself pretty well (at least for a 19-year-old), and I knew this would happen. But in knowing that I was moving to a different continent pretty soon and would be forced to zap out of my comfort zone completely, I tried to compensate by doing absolutely nothing.

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breaking free

I think the realisation that staying in your comfort zone forever simply won’t be possible hits most people sooner or later, and I would choose sooner over later any day. Because if I learned anything during my period of comfort zone maxing, it’s that your comfort zone will get a lot smaller if you don’t challenge it at all, and that’s probably the worst thing that can happen, if in your heart of hearts you still want to experience the world.

That’s why I think even though I am terrified of moving out, it is high time to free myself of the constraints of the comfort zone.

When I observe the people I look up to, it seems like taking a risk usually ends up being worth it — I mean, at the end of the day, what else is the goal but to experience? And I want to follow in their footsteps.

Moving out is definitely part of becoming your own person and somewhat of a rite of passage. Most people do it at some point. And pretty much everyone gets through it and learns from their failed attempts at adulting.

What makes it so scary is that for many of us, it’s the first time we really have to break out of our comfort zone. It’s the first time we have to make a proper decision on our own and are not forced into a path by the state or society.

I guess part of the reason why I am moving so far away is that I want to challenge myself. Because I want to grow as a person and experience a different way of life.

So, to ease the crippling anxiety I feel whenever I think about the fact that I will soon live in a city that is a 12h plane ride from home, I try to take the route of gratitude and tell myself:

What a blessing to be able to learn, grow, and make my own decisions.

What a blessing to not be caged in by my comfort zone.

And maybe, if you are currently in a similar situation to me, these affirmations will help you out too. Let’s grow together!

Love, Zoe

A few weeks before graduating from high school, we read “The Road not Taken” by Robert Frost in English class. Our teacher, a kind lover of literature, wanted to help us through the final stretch of school and with the decisions we would be faced with afterwards by providing us with a set of poems.

For some reason, this particular one stuck with me.

Just like the traveler, I am doing my best to predict the path my decisions will take me down as much as possible. I research the best universities to attend, read blog posts about the coolest countries to visit, watch videos about new side hustles to replace a 9-to-5 and lie in my bed, staring at the little LED stars on my ceiling, trying my best to figure out what I actually want from life.

But it seems impossible to decide.

I can see myself in every scenario I create. Everything makes sense to me. Honestly, a little too much sense for my liking. One moment the psychology degree seems most appealing, the next I just really want to give this music thing a try.

I would probably be happy either way. But what if not?

What if for some reason it’s not possible to undo a decision? What if I notice one year in that I just wasted my time? What if I end up living under a bridge, despising myself and the people around me for not leading me down the other path?

In my moments of fear and frustration, I try to remind myself of the final two verses of Frost’s poem and tell myself that “it’s not that deep”, which is probably exactly what our English teacher was trying to instil in us all along.

Despite the decision between both paths feeling seemingly impossible, enormously important, and horribly final, it probably really is not that deep (you won’t end up under a bridge).

Both paths are pretty much the same. Both paths will somehow lead to the goal or final destination or whatever should be attained in life (personally I am completely unsure of what that’s supposed to be, but that’s cool). And both paths will make the traveler happy.

In the final two verses, Frost gently pokes fun of people like me (and probably you), who feel like every decision is the most important decision of their life.

Maybe sometimes it’s a good idea to underthink, to go with the flow, to experience, to try, and to grow.

Love, Zoe