Every live is after the same thing, money. So they did what Egyptians do best and made it fun. People dance, streamers sing, others clap along. Some play a soundtrack in the background, and some bring out drums and a tabla. And it worked on me. I spent the night handing out flowers, so they would sing my name. Then I started asking for a اهداء لمامتي, screen recording every one and sending it to my mom. By the end of the night, I felt like I was sitting at Ahlam el asr.

It reminded me of a friend who only travels to relax. He doesn't care about new places, new food or new cultures. All he wants is a nice resort, a pause from the grind, and then home. As for everything else, he says, "I can do all of that from my phone."

He has a point. Travel used to mean walking into a place half blind. You knew a city from a few pictures online and the stories of people who had been there, and you expected not to know the rest. We asked strangers for directions, got lost, typed the coordinates into the Garmin, walked into the wrong restaurant and ended up at a new one. We learned a city alley by alley, street by street. You could tell who was well traveled and who wasn't.

Now you have seen every street and every landmark before you land. You know the culture and the places, so you arrive expecting everything. It is your first time there physically, but you have already seen it, and somehow that makes being there feel less special. Being well traveled used to mean you understood other cultures and had a wide view of life. Now you can have all of that without leaving Riyadh. You can tour a city and talk to its people from your phone. You can even pay them to sing to your mom.

So people still travel, just for other reasons. To relax, to wind down, to see and be seen, and not necessarily to come back more cultured. The trip stayed. What it stands for moved. The camel went through the same thing. It used to be how you crossed the desert, and now it lines up at camel beauty contests to be judged on its looks. We stopped needing both of them, and we kept both of them. They just do a different job now.

Walking went the same way. On those trips, it was how we found our way around a city, alley by alley. Now Maps finds the way for you and a car takes you there, so walking lost its job too. But in Riyadh, everyone starts walking once the weather gets good. In winter it becomes the thing to do after dinner. We grab tea from Mazaj Maghribi, drive to a walkway and park the car. Riyadh has plenty, and some of them turn trendy and crowded, so we skip those and look for an empty one. Then we walk, for the talk, for the steps, and for the tea.

Most of them loop. A street is built to take you somewhere, and a walkway is built to bring you back to your car. The one in Wadi Hanifa doesn't loop, so we walk until we feel like turning around and come back the way we came. And some nights we just keep going until we're tired, then take an Uber back to the car.

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She was finishing her degree that year, and her graduation project needed a case study. She picked me. For a couple of months she wrote down what I said and did, dated every entry, and filed each one under a skill and a level. I still have a copy of the report, because my family cherishes memories. Last week I was cleaning my room and found it, and it’s the first time I remember reading it.

In the morning line-up, I told my teacher she was thinner than Teacher Mashael. Compares sizes, level two. Two months later, in the same line-up, I announced that both Mohammeds in our class were short, but one of them was shorter. Compares sizes, level two, again. What the report leaves out is that I was taller than both of them. I wasn’t comparing. I was teasing. When we played house, I made myself the dad, another girl the mom, and Yara the maid who stays home and tidies up. Poor Yara. My first floor plan, a rectangle with a circle inside that I explained was the bathtub for my room, got a level one. Then I got to Nouf.

It was circle time on a Monday. Nouf came and sat down next to me, and I told her, “Nouf, it’s too tight here, there isn’t enough room for you.” My teacher’s assessment was that I understand the concept of space. Level two. She was being generous. It wasn’t the space I was looking at. It was Nouf’s belly when she came to sit next to me. Nouf, if you ever read this, I am sorry.

I sent the pages to our family group, because that’s what we do with this stuff and I knew it would make them laugh. It did. But the weird part was how reading it felt. There are plenty of pictures of me at that age, and they show what I looked like. They don’t give you the actual event. These lines did. Each one was a small clip from the past, and reading them felt like traveling back in time and living the exact moment again.

My dad’s archive has both kinds. First there are the photo albums. He’s posing in every one of them. Well dressed in front of his two seater in Austin. Another one wearing a tuxedo in Miami. They’re nice pictures, and it’s nice seeing him like that, but they don’t carry life.

Next to the albums are the cassettes, videos from his past and the hunting trips. He never shared them with us. We still have a working player, so I go through them myself. Nothing specific happens in them. It’s just nice seeing his unguarded presence more than thirty years ago, how he looked, how he spoke, his humor. In the albums he’s posing. On the tapes he’s just talking and being himself. The first one is cool, but the second version is the one I actually want to see.

I keep things too. Every gift card I’ve ever received. My cast from middle school, signed by my friends. The meeting notes from the failed startup I founded at seventeen. The posters and the model from the first villa I ever designed. A camera roll past ten thousand. I go back to most of it once every couple of years, if that. But if someone threw it out tomorrow I would care, because at some point I want to go back. And a lot of what I keep is to show my future family one day, a glimpse of how my life was.

So I choose. The nice pictures are the ones that go public, the ones I post, the ones I’d show my kids. When I pick one, I can already see it: my kids sitting around me, looking at their dad and thinking I was cool. The random ones stay in the camera roll. I keep every one of them, I just never pick them. And the random ones are the ones that carry life. In them I wasn’t posing. I wasn’t trying to look presentable. They caught the moment as it was, whether it was a picture or a video.

Which means I’m doing exactly what my dad did. I’m keeping both, the album and the tapes. The two seater in Austin and the tuxedo in Miami are just on a phone now, and the part I’ll actually hand over is the album. The KG report belongs with the tapes. Nobody in it was trying to make me look cool, and nobody handed it to me either. I found it cleaning my room, the same way I found my dad’s cassettes sitting next to his albums. We keep things to show the people we love, and that’s exactly why we show them the wrong ones.

One day my kids will sit around me, I’ll show them the nice ones, and maybe they’ll think their dad was cool. The random ones will be sitting somewhere, kept and never shown. If my kids turn out anything like me, that’s where they’ll go looking.

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I hate working alone, so I avoid the office and my room. When I do go out, I can’t just work anywhere. I need a calm place, not too quiet and not too busy, with a nice instrumental track in the background, because I dislike wearing headphones. I need the people around me to have the basics of work etiquette. And a decent iced coffee in the morning, or sparkling water with a cup of ice and lemon in the late afternoon. Unfortunately, as simple as my requests are, I rarely find a place in Riyadh that offers all of them. There’s always one missing term.

There is one place that usually carries all my terms, and that’s Wacafe DQ. It has the perfect balance between calm and lively, nice coffee and decent people, and for the last couple of years I have never had a bad encounter there. Last week, though, I decided to try out a new place. I sat down at a long shared table with four other guys, and a couple of minutes later someone sat down next to me. He was quiet and focused on his work, he was so respectable that he never once laid an eye on my laptop or on what I was doing. When I came back from a break, another guy had taken the seat across from us. He took out his MacBook, put on his AirPods Max, and a few minutes later the whole table was listening to JACKBOYS 2.

It was loud enough that I could clearly make out the lyrics. At first I assumed he had forgotten to connect his headphones, so I gave him fifteen minutes to notice on his own. He never did. He seemed too carried away with his work, which was very impressive, because I don’t know how anyone could focus with CHAMPAIN & VACAY blasting in the background.

So I walked over to him, apologized for interrupting, and told him he had forgotten to connect his headphones, because we could all hear what he was listening to. He couldn’t hear me, so he lifted the headphones off one ear, and as he did, the music came blasting out of them. Turns out they had been connected the whole time, and he just had it that loud. He put them back on, and the music carried on exactly as loud as before.

An hour later he got a call. Usually, if you’re sitting somewhere quiet, you get up and answer it outside, or at least answer quietly. He paid no regard to any of that. He was very loud, in an unnecessarily rude manner, planning a night out with a friend who was going to pick him up. At one point he told him, word for word and in front of everyone at the table, “A friend of mine is joining us. You guys haven’t met him but you’ll like him. He works at X, and the dude has money.” I cringed so bad.

Minutes later the same friend called again, and he was just as loud. This time I closed my laptop, turned to him, and kept staring. He waved apologetically, and told his friend, “It seems I’m disrupting the people next to me. No pressure if you guys can’t make it, there’s always next time.” Then he hung up. I guess having money didn’t cut it for them.

So my sentence got nothing, and my eyes got the whole thing. And it was a good sentence. I apologized, I explained, I was polite, and after it he knew exactly how loud he was. He just put his headphones back on. In Riyadh, polite words are something everyone owes everyone, so hearing them tells you nothing. He filed it where we all file that kind of sentence, under manners.

Most of what we say works that way. A host tells you the house is yours (البيت بيتك), and you both know you will never open his fridge. Someone asks how are you, I hope you’re well (وش لونك, عساك طيب), and nobody waits for the answers. The one who actually cares is the one who asks about your father by name. Ask anyone for a favor and you’ll hear (أبشر), consider it done, and the real yes is when he asks you to send him the file number right there. Everyone you run into at a wedding says (حياك), come by anytime, and the real invitation is the location pin he sends you the next day. And we say (ما تقصر), thank you for everything, even to people who did nothing, because the real thank you comes later, when you pay them back.

So the words go to everyone, and that’s the point. Because everyone gets the (أبشر) and the (حياك), nobody ever has to hear a no. The real choosing happens afterwards, in what people do, where nobody can point to it. We grow up reading hands and eyes before mouths.

That’s why the stare worked. Our old rooms come with actions for the things that matter. In a majlis you would shake your finjal when you’ve had enough coffee, and bukhoor would come in when the night is over, without anyone saying a word. A long shared table in a new café comes with none of that. There’s no gesture for “your music is too loud,” so all I had left was the oldest one, my eyes. And he understood it right away, because he grew up reading the same language I did. Even his answer worked that way. “No pressure, there’s always next time” was manners. The real answer was that he hung up.

After that I moved to an empty area to finish my work. Minutes later, a new guy came in and pulled out the chair right next to mine. He was very giggly, his body moved way too much, and it took him a good five minutes to settle in.

Then came the sniffling, then the chewing. I had to know what on earth could make that much noise, so I looked over.

A cookie.

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t stare. There’s a limit to how much social infrastructure I’m willing to build around a cookie, so I just packed my stuff and went home.

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That was not new, I have four years of it. My professors know more than I do and I have never pretended otherwise. I take criticism, I do not mind being wrong, and I follow their direction when I agree with it. My problem was narrower and I was clear with myself about it. They don’t get it. They don’t see what I see. Dr Faisal is very insightful when it comes to the structure, the systems, and all of those things. It is a bit challenging when it comes to new ideas that he has never heard of.

I had evidence for it, too. First term, my friends were assigned to strict professors, including the one known for building rookie architects from the ground up, whose students take the best design award year on year. I was put with someone who let me run my own vision even though it went against everything he believed in, and at the end of the term I won the prize. They thought they had it and I pulled it right from under them. I carried that for four years. An hour after that review Dr Faisal stopped me on the way out and walked me through how little it would take to shutdown Riyadh.

He did not start there. It was after class and there was no reason for either of us to still be in the building. He asked which buildings I liked, then why, then how I would have designed them. He asked about Maraya in AlUla and I told him I agree with the core of it, making the building carry the beauty of the place and the mountains around it, and that the execution is lazy architecture with a tie. He did not argue. He did not give me his own position on a single building. He just kept asking. Somewhere in there it came off buildings and onto context, then resources, then how little of them there is. He brought up the pipeline that was hit this month. He said whoever did it went for the oil, and that the water tanks and the power plants had been sitting there the whole time, and that going for those is how you paralyze a city.

Paralyze. Riyadh. Nobody thinks about it because it seems far away and it seems impossible. All it takes is shutting off the water and the electricity and you go back down to where you were, and worse.

Then he told me a story from the year of hunger in Najd. A man could not feed his family. His wife told him that sitting in the house will not bring provision, go out, maybe you will find something. This was before towns were secured, when there was still a wall. He walked with his mind so busy with what he was carrying that he stopped tracking where his feet were going, and he looked up and he was outside the walls. One of the Ageilat traders saw him and asked what brought him out here at this hour, night is coming and the gates close soon. He said he had not been in his right mind and had not noticed he had gone out. The trader took him to dinner and sent him home with food for his wife and his two daughters.

That was not long ago. Some of our great great grandparents witnessed it. Six generations later we order the entire menus in restaurants, not because we are hungry but because we want to try and taste. Not a roof over our heads but the biggest houses money buys, furnished from all over the world. We treat it like it is infinite. And while I was saying all of this out loud I heard myself add that we do not waste any of it. That we give the leftovers away on the way out. That we donate what we do not need. Nobody had accused me of anything. I said it because I wanted it on the record that we still carry the values.

My friends and I cant agree on a restaurant, so we order from multiple places, four different orders, four different delivery drivers from all around the city, and yet we don’t see them, I wouldn’t be able to pick them out of a room. They stop at the front door, drop the bag and leave.

My neighbor lives across the street from me. Nothing about what I owe him has changed. Nothing about what he owes me has changed. I barely see him and I know almost nothing about him.

Here is what I think happened, and it is not that anyone got worse. Nobody in that walled town went out in order to see the neighbor. They went out because the water was out there. The bread was out there. The mosque was out there. The house was too hot to sit in at that hour. The neighbor was on the way. Everything anyone knew about the people around them came free with an errand. Every convenience since has removed a trip. And nobody defends a byproduct, because on paper the trip was about the water.

We have more contact now than we have ever had. Groups, calls, everyone reachable in a second, all of it chosen. What the errands delivered was the other kind, the people you would never have picked and could not get around. My neighbor is the purest case of a person I did not choose, which is exactly why he is the one who went and my friends did not.

It happened in every field and it always arrived as an improvement. That trader sold to the people he lived among, which is the only reason he could read a man walking past the wall at the wrong hour and know something had gone wrong at his house. He was not being generous, he was being informed. Jahez took the seller out of the sale and the food still comes, faster and cheaper. Whatever my professors carry did not reach me through a syllabus either. It came through hallways and the walk to the car. A recorded lecture is better than a live one in almost every way you can measure. But It removes the hallway, and the hallway was the entire line.

As long as a man eats and travels and comes and goes, his affairs are fine. That sentence and they don’t see what I see are the same sentence. Neither is arrogance. Both are accurate reports from somebody whose only information is his own. I followed their direction when I agreed with it, which means every input I ever accepted had already been cleared by the instrument being tested. Individualism is not a position I took. It is what was left over.

An architect’s job is to remove trips. Parking under the tower so nobody stands in the sun. Everything under one roof. Circulation kept inside. A villa with a wall high enough that the street stops existing. The profession that is supposed to carry responsibility for this land and for building it up has defined quality as the removal of the exact thing that used to carry the rest of it. Nobody decided this. It came in as an improvement, every single time, for about a century.

She eats and travels and comes and goes. She is shiny and developed and the whole region watches her. Her affairs are fine. They are not fine. Check on the ones around you.

What we owe her is not a feeling on a Wednesday in September. It is that every decision any of us makes at work gets made on her account, and the bill almost never arrives while we are still standing there. We grew wheat in the desert and sold it abroad. That was a sound decision, made by serious people, for food the country needed. It was paid for out of water that had been under the sand since long before any of us, and the invoice turned up a generation later in a conversation that was not about wheat at all. Nobody in that room thought they were deciding anything about water.

Mine is buildings. The wall goes higher because the family wants privacy. The parking goes underneath because it is forty six in July. The circulation stays inside because the client asked for it and because it is correct. Not one person who drew any of that believed he was deciding whether a man would know his neighbor. Every one of those moves is taught, and every one of them is correct, and a student who leaves them out loses marks for it.

Dr Faisal told me his professors put those values in him, that he is carrying it to us, and that it is on us to hand it to whoever comes next. It reached me in an hour, in a hallway neither of us had a reason to be standing in. I have it now, and one day I hand it on. What nobody hands you is the list of what your work will cost, because the people it costs have not been born yet.

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My first thought was that they were tired of their families, that is not what any of them said, and is not how we live in Riyadh. Most families see each other at least once a week and most people see three or four friends inside the same week and nobody is forced to. We go because we want to go, a family that rearranges a whole summer in order to miss the people it loves is doing something that needs an explanation.

Heat is not it. Everyone leaves Riyadh in July, so leaving was never the question, arriving six weeks early is. The camp calendar is not it either, the camp did not move, the family moved and the Camp noticed. Rest is not it, because we do not rest alone, we travel in groups we take the same hotels we bring the cousins with us, so whatever is being avoided here is not people and and it is not obligation. I did not work it out there. I worked it out from twenty minutes in an office in Riyadh. Where a man I had never met, signed something for me, and then asked me for a favor that was not mine to give.

I had a paperwork that had been moving cleanly, approvals came one after the other until it reached the last desk, the one with the decision sitting on it. A week. Two weeks. Nothing, so I stopped waiting, drove to his office with no appointment and walked in.

He did not move, two phones on the desk, a stamp beside his hand, a stack of files with mine somewhere inside it. I pulled out every card I had and he sat there holding his ground, not hostile, just done with me before I started. I knew his family, his family and mine are friends, my uncle works in the same industry so I mentioned my uncle’s name in between conversation. The room turned over in about two seconds, he signed the paper, then he said say hi to your uncle for me. This one’s for him.

That was not politeness. He was telling me who the favor was for and asking me to deliver the receipt. I had never met him before that morning, and I will not meet him again, so nothing about it landed on me, it landed on my uncle. The two of them turned out to be friends, which I did not know when I said the name, and friends keep count. He did it for his friend. His friend owes him one now over a file he had never heard of. I got the signature, my uncle got the bill.

I never asked him. There is no way to ask. Your name can be committed by anybody who can place you, in rooms you are not in, over files you have never heard of, and the only part of it you get is being told after it is done.

At a gathering, I introduced two friends to each other. A sentence about each one, then I left them to it. I already knew their families were connected somehow, our families all know each other, so either they are family friends or there’s a crossing further back. They talked most of the night.

On the trip back, my friend asked me which branch the other guy’s family was from. I did not understand the question, you sat with him for four hours, I said. Why did you not just ask yourself? He said he did not feel like getting into pleasantries.

One question. He had four hours and he would not spend one question on it, because the answer does not arrive alone. Once the branch is named everything either of them said that night stops being two guys talking at a gathering, and becomes something there family could end up hearing. From then on every room they share comes with greetings they owe each other. They would both start weighing what they say. He was not avoiding the man. He was avoiding being on the record in front of him.

The plates work the same way. People in Riyadh turn down on a special plate. The kind that gets bid on, because they do not want to be spotted on the street. Not one of them is doing anything he should not be doing. It is a normal Thursday and the car is going somewhere normal but a special plate is a signature on a moving object. Somebody pulls up next to you at a light, reads a plate he will remember, and now you’re available to be brought up in room you are not in, a week later by a man who’s only involvement was stopping at the same light.

The summer is not a break from family. Nobody picks a city where they are unknown. August on that lake is Riyadh with a different postal code. They picked the six weeks before it fills, which is the only stretch of the year when nobody around them has the standing to commit them to anything. Every week at home, is a week of people quietly establishing that they know you, not for that night, for later. You cannot opt out of that, and it has nothing to do with whether you show up.

I told my uncle afterwards, it was already signed, so there was nothing for him to do with the information. The coordinator was still holding that July list when we stood up to leave.

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Yet he is unemployed by choice. Instead of using his early years to gain experience and build a name, he is gambling his time on a startup with a very low chance of success.

He walked me through it over dinner, calm the whole way. Even his worst case had good revenue in it. I nodded like I was listening to a brave man.

Later on I was working on a proposal, something I had a real chance of securing. I could either play it safe with the go-to basic proposal, or completely go off track with something bold that would definitely be memorable, but could also risk me losing the deal.

I ended up going with the second option, and for a while I told myself I was fearless.

It wasn’t until I sent the email that I saw it. I didn’t reread it. Didn’t check how I sounded, I sent it and closed the laptop. That’s not what wanting something looks like. People who want it read the email ten times. I didn’t need this deal, and some part of me had settled the outcome before it arrived.

That’s when my cousin came back to me. Neither of us was brave. He could afford to lose the year. I could afford to lose the deal. We took risks that couldn’t reach us and called it courage.

That would be the whole story, except for something I’ve never been able to explain until now.

Every time I watch someone reach a thing I’ve already reached, they’re happier than I was. More thrilled, lit up in a way I wasn’t when it was my turn. I used to think they were just newer to it, or more emotional than me.

Now I think it’s the same thing as the email.

The reason I could take the risk without flinching is the reason the reward never landed. I didn’t need it. And a thing you don’t need can’t feel like much when it comes. The person lighting up needed it. It could have taken something from them, so when it didn’t, they felt it. I was safe the whole way through, and being safe the whole way through is what made it quiet.

It’s not two things. It’s one. What lets you afford the risk is what keeps you from feeling the win.

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I sensed a Lebanese accent under his English, so I asked where he was from, and my assumption was correct. Being right felt like knowing him. Two Arabs in a French terminal, and one of them was stuck. He was calm. He was presentable. He did not stand the way men stand when they ask for money, and it did not cross my mind, not once, that this was what was happening. So I gave him the fifty. I hoped it covered him. He had named the amount and I never asked what it was for.

He took the notes and said he would go pay for the rescheduled flight now. Nobody had asked him anything. The wallet was already open, the thing was already finished, and he filled the silence anyway. Fifty euros buys nothing out of Paris. A rescheduling fee can be paid by anyone, from anywhere, which is what you do when your card is the problem. And a man dressed like that has at least three people he can call before he starts stopping strangers. I watched him after that. He did not go to a counter. He walked back toward the doors.

He owned a shirt, a belt, a carry-on and four sentences. That was the whole operation and it worked on me in under a minute. You buy the jacket before you have the job. You rehearse the answer before anyone asks the question. Look the part and you get the part, and nobody in the room asks to see the thing behind it. The act is a bridge. It carries you over the stretch where you still have nothing. How well a man performs is not the interesting question. What happens to the bridge afterwards is.

The start-up founder lies about tense. The platform does. The team is. The numbers show. All of it is true, just not yet. His is the only version of the act that work can catch up to. He pays for the gap himself, in hours, for years, and it shows on him. Not only himself, though. The engineer who took equity instead of salary is paying too. So is the first customer, who bought the present tense at full price.

You can tell who crossed by where the proof lives. Early on it lives in his sentences, because there is nowhere else to keep it. Later it should have moved. The customer says it. The numbers say it. He can give you the boring version now, the two years when nothing happened, the client who left, the month payroll went out late, and none of it costs him anything, because the thing is standing behind him and does not need his help. Nobody burns the bridge. It stops carrying weight and he walks away from it. When a man is twenty years in and the evidence is still coming out of his own mouth, it never stopped carrying weight, and there was never anything on the other side.

Then there is the man who cannot leave it because he is standing on it. He never reached the other side. Every performance he gives creates a debt that only a larger performance can pay, so this year is funded by money that arrived last year, and the thing has to keep widening or it drops. We have a word for him. Ponzi. It has a shape, a name, and a sentence at the end of it, and we can all agree on him in about four seconds.

We have no word for the common version. He is fifty-two. Three companies, good titles at all of them, paid well at the third. He is excellent in a room and everyone says so. He has never built anything, and he has never had to, because the manner has always arrived before anyone checked the work. Nothing he does accumulates. He gets the meeting, performs, gets the next meeting, and at no point does any of it turn into the thing the performance keeps implying. He is doing exactly what the man in the terminal does, in a better building, at a much higher price. The only difference is silence. The man at the terminal got one second of it and could not hold it. This one has been holding it for thirty years.

The man at CDG is still in that terminal. Same chinos, same shirt, handle up on the carry-on so he looks like he is going somewhere. He takes fifty from a stranger, walks back toward the doors, starts again. You can stand in one spot and watch his entire circle close in under an hour, and that is the only thing wrong with it. The other one takes thirty years to come around. Thirty years is too long to stand and watch. So we call one of them a beggar, and the other one a career.

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I had arrived at nine with a book and my weekly planner. Café des Bergues, by the Rhône. I ordered my coffee and planned my week first, on paper. When I finished I ordered a chocolate croissant and read a few pages. Then I picked up my phone and started writing last week’s piece, and the morning disappeared into it. Three hours passed like forty minutes. Anyone watching would have seen a man attached to a screen all morning. In my defense, I was writing. Technically I was not using my phone.

My first thought was the first thought. They are present, we are addicted. It is the conclusion everyone reaches within a second, which is exactly why I did not trust it. And I distrust the other easy move too, the one where everything the West does becomes a virtue. So I refused to accept that it was cultural, that the Swiss are simply more aware than us. I decided to test it instead.

For a week I tracked every table at every place I ate. A Michelin restaurant, a café in the old town, a brunch spot. Breakfasts, lunches, dinners. The pattern held everywhere. No phones. So I started killing explanations. It was not culture. It was not free time either. Think of Riyadh on a Thursday night. Nobody has work in the morning. The table is full of friends with nowhere to be, and the phones are out anyway, face up between the cups, passed around to show a clip, lifted mid-sentence to check nothing in particular. The freest night of the week, and every table is half somewhere else. So freedom does not explain Geneva. And it was not discipline. I knew that because of what I had been doing at my own table all week while I watched theirs.

My notifications are off. All of them, always. Nothing buzzes, nothing lights up, nothing can reach across the table and pull me away. That morning nothing did. And still, every few minutes, I left the writing. I opened my messages to see if anyone had replied to what I had sent. Usually no one had. I took two or three swipes through TikTok before closing it, the way you open the fridge, find nothing new, and stand there for a second anyway. Then I went back to the essay. Nobody came for me. I went.

Moments get broken for a reason. Nobody can sell you a whole hour inside a novel. Nobody can sell a ninety minute conversation. There is nothing to cut into, no space to price. To sell attention you first have to break it into small pieces. Seconds. Swipes. The pause between two sentences. That was always the business of the feed. Not stealing my attention. Melting my hours into pieces that fit.

The first way to break a moment was interruption. The buzz, the banner, the red dot on the icon. It worked for years, and then people learned to turn it all off. I turned mine off long ago. So the method changed. The phone no longer needs to call you. You go to it. Every message I send opens a small loop, and until it closes, a part of me stands waiting at its door. No buzz required. I come back on my own to see if it closed. That is what I was doing every few minutes at that table. Not checking the phone. Checking the pieces of myself I had left in other people’s pockets.

So I was wrong about the room. The pregnant woman was not more present than me, and the two friends were not more disciplined. Nothing of theirs was pending. They had sent nothing that morning that could come back to them. For a few hours they stood outside the whole supply chain, not through effort but through balance. What I had been calling presence all week was something smaller and stranger. It was owing nothing.

For a while I liked this explanation. It was the kindest one yet. I was not addicted, I was owed. I was waiting on real people and real replies. But it does not survive the numbers. Most of the times I checked, no one had replied. I knew no one had replied. The loop was exactly where I had left it. And I checked again ten minutes later. If it were really about the replies, an empty inbox would have taught my hand to stop. It did not. The debt trained the visit, and the visit no longer needs the debt.

I spent a week watching strangers to learn this, which is its own way of staring at something. And I still cannot tell you what the people in that café had that I do not. All I know is what my own table showed. The phone was silent. Nobody had replied. And my hand went back anyway.

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Then you walk in. The staircase is the first thing that stops you. Original marble still preserved, an iron railing with every curl bent by hand, and a window at the landing framed toward the garden rather than the sea. Standing there I had a flash. A family descending these same steps 120 years ago in the fashion of the late nineteenth century. The image lasted a second. Then you move through the rooms and the same feeling follows you. A different floor in every room. Thousands of individual stones laid into patterns that exist nowhere else, designed to sit mostly under furniture and feet. Frescoed ceilings painted by hand in rooms meant for sleeping, not showing. Every surface in that villa was made by someone answering to one thing only. This specific room. This specific hill.

None of it was made to be unique. Uniqueness was simply what happened when a craftsman had no other option except to respond to what was directly in front of him. The stone was local. The hands were local. The light coming through that arched window was local. There was no catalog to order from, no template to follow, no universal standard to meet. The person who laid that floor wasn't trying to make something beautiful. He was just answering to the room. And because he could only answer to that room, the result could only exist in that room.

That is what I kept coming back to. Not the beauty. Beauty can be produced. What stays with you is the evidence of sacrificed time. The quiet proof that a human being passed through this object and left something of themselves inside it. We are better at detecting that than we think. We can't always name it. But we feel its absence the moment we walk into a room that doesn't have it.

A few days later I visited CityLife, a business district in Milan, it was my first time visiting that part of the city. I walked in and felt nothing new. Not because it was ugly. It wasn't. In fact it was designed by three of the most celebrated architects of our time, Zaha Hadid, Arata Isozaki, and Daniel Libeskind. Clean, functional, well designed by every modern standard. But I had already been there. Not that specific building, but everything it was made of. The same glass, the same proportions, the same finishes you find in every new development in every city that has decided to look like progress. I walked through it the same way you scroll through a feed, nothing stopping your eye, nothing asking anything of you. Familiarity used to require time. Now it can arrive before you do.

The industrial revolution didn't just change how buildings were made. It introduced a logic. The best solution is the one that works everywhere, for everyone, at the lowest cost. Universal over specific. Scalable over bespoke. And once that logic took hold, the catalog replaced the craftsman. The question stopped being what does this specific place require. It became which available part fits. The building stopped answering to its hill. The hill was reshaped to receive whatever the catalog offered. Zaha Hadid is one of the most talented architects who ever lived. But even talent, when it operates inside a system built for universality, produces something your eyes have already seen. The problem was never the architects. It was the logic they were building inside.

That logic did not stay in architecture. The same system that replaced the craftsman with the catalog, the specific with the universal, eventually reached people. A person used to be shaped by forces that existed nowhere else. The family they were born into, the city they grew up in, the specific culture and contradictions that surrounded them. Those local constraints produced someone your eyes didn't already know. Someone who could only have come from there.

Nine times out of ten, within the first few minutes of meeting someone, I already know who they are. Not because I am perceptive. Because they are not answering to their specific hill anymore. They are answering to what works everywhere. The same shows, the same references, the same humor, the same template for what an impressive person looks like and sounds like. The algorithm replaced the local constraint the same way the catalog replaced the craftsman. And just like CityLife, the result functions. Nobody complains. But you walk in and feel nothing new because you have already been there.

What we lost is not uniqueness. Uniqueness was never something people chose or chased. It was the unavoidable result of growing up inside constraints that existed nowhere else. A specific family, a specific city, a specific set of contradictions that shaped you before you had any say in it. Those constraints are gone. Not because people stopped being interesting but because the forces that once made someone impossible to already know have been replaced by forces designed to work on everyone equally. You cannot produce a Villa Eduardo by handing an architect a catalog. You also cannot produce a person worth being surprised by if everything that shaped them was designed to scale.

The craftsman who laid that floor in Villa Eduardo never met you. He had no idea you were coming. He made it that way anyway, not for an audience, but because the room demanded it. The floor sits mostly in shadow, under furniture, beneath feet that rarely stop to look. Nobody required that level of attention. He gave it anyway, because his only brief was the specific room in front of him and that room deserved his best work. Nobody makes anything for the room anymore. Not buildings. Not themselves.

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In our house, passports are kept inside a file in one of my father’s drawers. Whenever I travel, I know exactly where to find mine, and whenever I return it goes right back into the same file. So when I started preparing for my summer trip and couldn’t find it, I wasn’t too worried at first. I figured it had been moved somewhere else. But after searching the files, the house, and just about everywhere we could think of, it became clear that somewhere along the way my passport had gone missing.

Replacing it turned out to be surprisingly easy. I reported it as lost through Absher, paid the fine, requested a replacement, and within days a new passport was delivered to my house. The entire process took place from my phone. No paperwork. No running around. No confusion. The experience was so smooth that I barely thought about it. I simply ticked the box in my head and moved on to the next thing.

The next thing, unfortunately, was my Schengen visa. Since the original visa was attached to the lost passport, I had to apply for a new one. Unlike the passport renewal, this process felt like stepping into a different era. Forms, letters, reports, appointments, and endless requirements. I submitted everything they asked for and made it clear that I already had an active visa attached to the lost passport. A week before my flight, my application was rejected because that visa first needed to be cancelled. That would’ve been useful information a few weeks earlier.

The funny thing is that neither problem was really mine. I didn’t misplace the passport, and I didn’t withhold any information about my visa. Yet somehow both ended up on my desk. It didn’t matter where the mistake started. The trip was mine, so fixing the problem became my responsibility.

Once I noticed it, I started seeing the same pattern everywhere. Someone rear-ends your car and suddenly your week revolves around insurance claims and repair shops. An airline cancels a flight and now you’re the one rearranging hotel bookings and connections. A contractor makes a mistake and the homeowner spends months dealing with it. The burden and the fault often belong to different people. Life has a habit of handing responsibility to the person most invested in the outcome, not necessarily the person who created the problem.

We spend our lives building systems that protect us from uncertainty, only to discover that uncertainty usually enters through other people. Through family members, colleagues, airlines, embassies, and complete strangers. The very thing that makes life work is also what makes it unpredictable. The more your life intersects with others, the more control you have to surrender.

And maybe that’s the trade-off. A life with complete control would require complete independence. No family members to misplace your passport. No visa officers reviewing your application. No airlines flying you across the world. No one capable of disrupting your plans, but no one capable of helping them either.

I’m writing this two days before my flight and the embassy still has my passport. Hopefully by the time you’re reading this, I have it back. If not, the title of this piece becomes a lot more relevant.

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Then my friend arrived. I say this with love, because he is genuinely one of the funniest people I know. But some people are at their best in the right room. Put him in a diwaniya with a group of friends, and his energy works. The louder he gets, the better the night becomes. Everyone is already there for the same kind of chaos, so nothing feels out of place. But at Koojeh, the same humor sat differently. The jokes were funny, and I was laughing, but he kept taking the laugh as a reason to give more. A waiter interaction became a bit. A small comment became a performance. A joke that landed once had to be repeated until it started landing on him instead. He was making the table lighter, but somehow making himself smaller.

There’s a difference between being funny and becoming the joke. Some people know when to stop. They can make everyone laugh, then step back before the laugh starts using them. Others keep adding to the moment until people are no longer laughing with them in the same way. They are still funny, but you can feel their weight in the room getting lighter.

I thought about this last week when we visited my grandfather’s sister, 3amti Re8aya. The visit lasted around an hour, but it was easily the best part of my day. She is not the type of person you instantly become casual with. There is a line around her, but it is not dramatic or announced. You just understand it. You sit properly. You choose your tone. You don’t overstep. And somehow, none of that makes her heavy to be around.

The funny thing is that 3amti Re8aya is hilarious. Not in the loud, restless way where someone keeps reaching for the laugh, but in a way that feels almost effortless. She tells a story slowly, lets the details arrive at the right time, changes her tone without overacting, and somehow knows exactly where the funny part is before anyone else does. She does not perform for the room, and that is probably why it works. The laugh comes, but it never pulls her down with it.

That is what makes people like 3amti Re8aya rare. It is not just that they are funny or respected. Plenty of people are one or the other. The rare thing is knowing how much of themselves to give to a room. They can make people laugh without handing themselves over to the laugh. They can be warm without becoming too available, and serious without making the room feel heavy. Sitting with them reminds you that being enjoyable does not require becoming easy to handle.

By the time we left, I realized the difference was not about being loud, filtered, or even appropriate. 3amti Re8aya can say things that someone else would never recover from, and somehow nothing about her drops. She can make everyone laugh, then look across the room once and remind you that she is still the person in charge. That is the kind of person I mean. Someone who can go further than you expect, but never further than they can carry.

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You put in the effort to roll over to the bedside and dial the kitchen through your intercom. Breakfast gets delivered to your bed while you channel surf. After enough bed rotting, you finally get dressed and leave your room, not bothered by the mess you left behind because the maids will come in and clean it for you. You’re bored. You have nothing to do. So you call the driver and ask him to turn on the car, knowing you’re not leaving yet, but wanting it to cool from the Riyadh heat before you come down in fifteen minutes.

He later drives you to Al Mamlakah, where you shop at Riyadh’s newest hotspot at the time, Saks Fifth Avenue. You get dropped right in front of the gate, accompanied by your other driver, whose only job is to carry your bags. You go through the rest of the day with ease. Not a single inconvenience.

By the time you come back home, the day still feels untouched. You went out, shopped at the newest place in Riyadh, bought whatever you felt like buying, came back with bags you barely carried, and somehow it still feels like you did nothing. So you go back to your room, throw yourself on bed, channel surf again, order the chef to cook you something even though you are not really hungry, and wait for the day to end. But it doesn’t. It just stretches. One hour becomes three, then five, until it is 6AM and you are still awake from yesterday.

At 6AM, the house is finally quiet. The staff are asleep, which means for once, if you want something from the kitchen, you actually have to get it yourself. So you drag yourself out of bed for a snack and bump into your brother. He has just woken up. He spent the past few years abroad for university, living in a place where no one made breakfast for him, no one cleaned his room, no one did his laundry, and no one started the car before he came down. You are still awake from yesterday. He is already starting today.

That contrast matters. You came from the same house, but life did not touch you the same way. One of you was protected from almost every small demand. The other was forced to meet them. Cooking, cleaning, walking, waking up, organizing time, fixing whatever went wrong. None of these things are impressive on their own. They are not heroic. They are just the boring parts of being alive. But maybe that is exactly why they matter. They keep you inside your own life.

Back then, this kind of emptiness was easier to diagnose because the comfort was visible. A driver was a driver. A maid was a maid. A cook was a cook. The privilege had names, faces, salaries, rooms, and routines. If you became numb because too much of life had been handled for you, you could at least see what was handling it. You knew your life was different because the difference was walking around the house.

Now the same thing is harder to see because it no longer belongs to that world alone. You do not need the house, the staff, or the drivers to access fragments of that old life. Not a private driver, but Uber. Not a private chef, but HungerStation. Not full-time staff, but hourly cleaners. Not an assistant, but apps that book, deliver, remind, navigate, pay, search, and solve small inconveniences before they even become real inconveniences. We did not all move into that life. Pieces of it just became available by the ride, by the meal, by the hour.

And because everyone around us uses the same comforts, we stopped seeing them as comfort. They became normal. Ordering food from bed is normal. Taking a car for a distance you could have walked is normal. Scrolling for hours because everything else feels like too much effort is normal. Letting the day melt while your room, your food, your errands, and your entertainment are handled through a screen is normal. So when the emptiness comes, it does not feel like the side effect of comfort. It feels like a personal defect.

That is what makes the modern version harder to understand. Someone living that life could look around and know it was too soft. The staff, the drivers, the house, the distance between him and the rest of the world. The comfort had evidence. But today, you still have a career, work, deadlines, pressure, bills, comparison, and stress. You do not feel like someone living in luxury, so you do not suspect luxury is part of the problem. You blame yourself instead. You call it laziness, brain rot, burnout, lack of discipline, bad sleep, too much screen time. And maybe it is all of those things. But maybe it is also something older wearing modern clothes.

Maybe bed rotting is not a new disease. Maybe it is an old rich-person symptom that became mass-market. The difference is that back then, the condition looked abnormal. Today it looks like an average evening. A phone, a delivery app, a dark room, a full stomach, no real movement, no clear reason to get up, and a strange emptiness that keeps surviving every comfort you feed it.

The curse is not that we became too comfortable. Comfort itself is not evil, and pretending otherwise is dishonest. The curse is that comfort became too normal to blame. The man in 2001 had one advantage over us: his privilege was visible enough to diagnose. Our problem is that pieces of the same privilege have become so ordinary that we inherited the numbness without recognizing the luxury that produced it.

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A while later, a girl sat a few tables across from me. We were the only two people seated there, so her presence naturally stood out. She had one of those coded looks that gives you an impression before the person even speaks. Dark hair, messy bangs, sharp eyes, and a style that felt too intentional to be random. I made my assumption, didn’t think much of it, and went back to my coffee.

About thirty minutes later, another person walked in. Short hair, wide joggers, a black denim jacket, gold earrings, and black leather loafers. The second she saw her, her face changed. They both lit up, rushed toward each other, hugged, and held on for a little longer than a normal greeting. It had that loud, excited energy of two people who hadn’t seen each other in months. At first, the scene looked obvious to me. I thought, great, her girlfriend just arrived.

Then he started speaking. His voice had a deep pitch that made me look up again, and that’s when I realized I had misread the whole thing. This was not a girlfriend arriving. It was a guy, and the two of them were not a couple. They were just catching up. Then he asked her what was going on in her love life, and the conversation moved somewhere I wasn’t expecting to hear that openly, that early in the morning, and definitely not the loudly.

The topic itself was only part of it. The harder part to ignore was how comfortable they were saying it out loud. The hug, the volume, the details, the complete lack of adjustment to where they were. They were talking about things most people around them would still reject, morally and socially, but nothing in their tone showed that they felt the weight of that. It wasn’t careful. It wasn’t quiet. It didn’t even seem like they considered that this might not be the place for it.

If it had been two people speaking too loudly about something private, I probably would have dismissed it. People get carried away, especially when they’re catching up. A conversation starts at the table, then slowly forgets the room around it. But this didn’t feel like that. It didn’t feel like a private moment that accidentally became public. It felt like they knew exactly where they were, knew the line was still there, and still felt no need to lower their voice around it.

The easy answer is to say: if they are not harming anyone, why should anyone care? I understand why that sounds reasonable, especially to a generation that treats personal freedom as the final argument. But that answer makes harm too small. It treats society like separate people standing next to each other, each one doing his own thing as long as he doesn’t physically touch the next person. Public life does not work that way. What people say out loud, what they normalize, and what they expect everyone else to quietly absorb changes the space, even if nobody is directly harmed.

People always crossed lines. That is not new. Saudi was never that innocent, and I’m not pretending everyone lived exactly the way they appeared in public. But there used to be a difference between having a private contradiction and carrying it into public without lowering your voice. Even when people crossed the line, they still acknowledged the line. They hid it, softened it, spoke around it, or at least showed some awareness that this was not something to place in public. They were not doing that. The violation was not new. Saying it out loud with no embarrassment was.

Later, they started talking about JAX, which made sense. They looked like that crowd. JAX is not just a place in Riyadh anymore; it has its own scene, its own regulars, and its own idea of who belongs there. They aren’t my crowd, and I don’t care to defend the place, but even inside that bubble, apparently, someone was ruining it. They were complaining about a new type of people showing up, as if the space had been fine until the wrong crowd entered it. That was the irony. They were sitting in front of me, crossing a line most of society still recognizes, while also complaining about other people crossing theirs.

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My friends and I were spending winter break in London. One night, we had just come back from dinner, and everyone was slowly getting ready to sleep after a long day. But I was sleepless and still had some energy left in me, so I called another friend of mine who was staying at a hotel a couple blocks away. It was late at night, everything was closed, and we had nowhere to go, so we called a driver and told him to just drive around the city. We cruised around London with no destination in mind, playing our favorite music, chatting, and enjoying each other’s company while the rain was hitting the windows.

After a while, we were done driving around, so I dropped my friend off at his hotel in Knightsbridge. I got out too because I wanted to enjoy the rain and walk back to my place alone. My friend thought I was crazy for walking back in the middle of the night, and kept insisting I let the driver take me. But I refused. It was just a twenty-minute walk back to my place in Mayfair, and the weather made it feel worth it. Besides, what could go wrong? Apparently, everything.

The walk was quiet at first. The streets were peaceful, the rain was steady, and for the first few minutes I was actually enjoying it. Then, while I was crossing the street, a strong gust of wind snatched the umbrella out of my hand. It flew onto the road, and just as I went to grab it, a car zoomed by and ran it over, smashing it into pieces. At that point, I was done. I got the peacefulness I wanted from the walk and was ready to go back. I took cover under the nearest canopy, pulled out my phone to order a car, and of course, my phone was dead. So there I was, standing in the street at midnight, rain pouring, umbrella gone, phone dead, and no way to order a car or call anyone.

There was nothing useful left to do. I could stand there annoyed, staring at a dead phone and a broken umbrella, or I could accept that the situation had already happened and wait it out. So I sat on a nearby bench and waited. After a while, an Emirati guy approached me holding an extra umbrella. He had spotted me from his hotel window across the street and came down to make sure I was alright. I was moved by the gesture, so we started talking. And since the night was already going in a random direction, I invited him to walk with me across Knightsbridge. We got to know each other, exchanged contacts, and called it a night.

I walked back thinking the night had somehow ended on a good note. Yes, my umbrella was gone, my phone was dead, and I was soaked, but at least I came back with a story and a new friend. My friends, on the other hand, had been living a completely different night. Twenty minutes after my friend and I got out of the car, he called to check if I had arrived safely. He couldn’t reach me, so he called the others, only to find out I still wasn’t back. From their side, I was missing in London, late at night, with a dead phone, after choosing to walk alone in the rain. Obviously, their minds went straight to the worst possible scenarios. Our place was right across the Saudi embassy, so as I approached the apartment, one of my friends was already rushing out to report me missing. I came in full of excitement, ready to tell them what happened, but his lifeless face wiped the excitement right off mine. Needless to say, that was the end of my solo midnight walks for the rest of the trip.

I think that’s where اشوا comes from. It’s not denial, and it’s not pretending the situation is fine when it isn’t. It’s just a way of putting things back to size. Life was never promised to be perfect. The Quran puts it plainly: “لَقَدْ خَلَقْنَا الْإِنسَانَ فِي كَبَدٍ” (We have certainly created man in hardship). So when something goes wrong, I try not to give every inconvenience the weight of a disaster. Some setbacks are serious, and some are just uncomfortable for a while. If it won’t matter a week from now, if not by the next morning, then الحمدلله, اشوا, it wasn’t something worse.

If my phone had survived, I would have ordered a car. If the umbrella had survived, I would have walked back without stopping. If the rain had eased, he may have never come down from his hotel. Everything that made the night worth remembering came from the parts that went wrong. So maybe that’s why I don’t panic quickly at every inconvenience. Because Sometimes the part you’re cursing in the moment ends up being the only reason the story is worth telling later.

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Whenever my grandfather starts one of his success lectures, I usually push back. He tells me his generation worked harder, wanted less, and built themselves from nothing. I tell him he played life on easy mode. He hates it, of course, and maybe he should. His life was not soft. He grew up in a country with fewer comforts, fewer systems, and later watched the mid-eighties recession wipe out a generation of boom-era businesses. I am not saying his life was easy. That would be stupid. I am saying opportunity was easier. There is a difference.

That is the part most success lectures leave out. They tell you about discipline, hunger, long hours, and patience. They rarely mention the market that was willing to reward those things at a much higher rate than it would today. Every generation has some kind of leverage. The mistake is assuming leverage always looks the same.

In the mid-seventies, Saudi witnessed an oil boom that did more than make people richer. It opened the field. The country was still being built, industries were still young, and there were not enough qualified people for the amount of opportunity being created. A degree meant something because not many had one. English meant something because not many spoke it. Starting a business meant something because the market was not packed yet. You did not need to reinvent anything. You just had to be early, decent, and present.

One of my professors makes this argument difficult. He came from a small local town, graduated high school in the late fifties, and could barely speak English at the time. He later got accepted into Harvard. I say this with respect, because he clearly became the kind of man who deserved to be there. But the entry point is what interests me. He was not one Saudi applicant among thousands fighting for the same seat. He was THE Saudi applicant. That sounds offensive, but it’s the point. Being capable and early could put you in rooms that today require you to defeat an entire generation just to enter.

But the easy-mode card has a limit. The oil drop and recession of the mid-eighties didn’t let everyone keep what the boom had handed them. It filtered the market. Businesses that were only alive because demand was high and competition was low disappeared once things got tighter. The ones that survived earned their credibility. They were no longer just early. They had enough skill, discipline, or experience to stay standing when the market stopped doing half the work.

This is where my generation gets irritated. Not because we think they did nothing. They did a lot. But the same things that once pushed a man forward barely moves anyone today. A degree is expected. English is expected. Starting a business no longer means entering an empty market. It means entering a market where everyone has the same idea, the same supplier, the same Instagram page, and the same confidence. What used to make someone stand out now barely gets him through the door. Their effort bought movement. Ours buys a chance to compete.

That is why a conversation I had last week stayed with me. I was sitting between Faisal, an actuarial analyst who had just landed an offer at an insurance company, and Talal, a final-year computer science student who looked like the future had become a little too loud. Faisal was telling us how he used AI to build a dashboard that ended up outperforming work done by intern coders in another department. He did not say it arrogantly. That almost made it worse. He said it casually, like he had just found a shortcut on Google Maps.

Talal laughed, but not fully. It was the kind of laugh people give when they understand the joke is partly on them. He had spent four years learning the thing Faisal had just borrowed. And for a second, the whole argument stopped being about grandfathers, oil booms, and old opportunities. It was sitting right there between us. One person had paid the full price of a skill. The other had found leverage. I do not think Faisal used AI because he wanted to avoid effort. I think he used it because effort alone no longer pays the way people pretend it does.

That is why Talal’s dashboard matters. It was not just a story about AI. It was a preview of our version of the boom. My grandfather’s generation had timing, scarcity, and a country still being built. My generation has a harder market, but a different kind of leverage. The old inputs no longer move us the same way, but AI might. Not because it replaces effort, but because it multiplies the people who know what to attach it to. Maybe that is the new easy mode. Not doing less, but knowing what to multiply.

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It turned out the parking lot I had entered was designated for female students, which made the whole reaction a lot more understandable. Once that was cleared up, they let me through, and Nasser, one of the guards, walked with me to the car.

By the time we got to my sister’s car, the tire was the least interesting part of the morning. I called a puncture to come fix it, and while we waited, the sun was doing what Riyadh sun does best, making even the shortest pause feel longer than it is. All I wanted was to get back into the car, turn the AC on, and squeeze in a bit of work while the tire was being handled. It felt like the natural way to wait. But Nasser was still there, standing by the car and making small talk, and there was no normal way to sink back into my seat without making it feel more dismissive than I meant it to be.

But later, the heat stopped feeling like a convincing excuse. I have sat under harsher sun and still felt that familiar pull toward the stranger next to me. Put me near someone at a beach club, or beside someone on a bench by Jardin Anglais, and my curiosity usually wakes up before a word is even exchanged. Certain people make you want to know more before they have even said anything. The urge comes easily then. So it was not really the heat. The heat may have made me restless, but it was not the reason. The real question was why, with Nasser, that urge had been completely absent.

At first, it felt like nothing more than a way to pass the time. Just small talk while we waited for the puncture to arrive. But the longer Nasser spoke, the less casual the conversation started to feel. Detail by detail, the gap widened between the man standing beside me and the one I had assumed he was.

He was only twenty-seven, but the life he described already felt crowded with versions of himself that never got the chance to happen. He had once been one of the top athletes at the National Olympic Center and was even nominated to join the Saudi national team, until his father refused and that path was shut down before it could begin. And it was not the only time. More than once, a bigger life seemed to open in front of him, and more than once it was closed again. By the time he was done, what stood beside me in that parking lot did not feel like a man with one difficult story behind him, but someone carrying the weight of several futures that had almost been his.

What stayed with me was not just that Nasser had a story. That part is obvious. Everyone does. It was how naturally I had assumed there was nothing there for me to discover in the first place. In other settings, my curiosity tends to show up early, sometimes before a word is even exchanged. But with Nasser, it had never shown up at all. And that was the part I could not shake. Not that I had misjudged him, but how easily, how automatically, I had done it.

The more I sat with it, the less it felt like a one-off failure in judgment and the more it felt like a habit I had never properly examined. Some people seem to arrive preloaded with depth. Before they have even spoken, something about them makes you more willing to lean in. Others arrive through a role. You meet them through that role before you meet them as a person, and without realizing it, you let that role do all the talking.

Nasser did not become interesting once he started talking. He had been interesting all along. What changed was that, for the first time, I was made to see past the role he had entered my morning in. That was the part that stayed with me. Not the surprise of his story itself, but the ease with which my curiosity had stopped short before ever reaching him.

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A couple of summers ago, I was doing an internship at a company located in Olaya Towers. For those of you unfamiliar, it is one of the busiest, most hectic office towers in the city. The parking situation is a complete nightmare, let alone the packed elevator lines. Getting from my car to the office was a workout in itself.

After a few days in the new office, I had already found my footing. I got the hang of the office language and the role each colleague seemed to play. Every break, us interns would eat lunch together, except for one: Mohammed, who would go MIA. Not once, not twice, but every single break, he would disappear.

One morning, I bumped into Mohammed at the lobby. We made small talk while the elevators came and went, waiting for an empty one to arrive. Out of the blue, Mohammed excused himself and rushed into a packed elevator. He crammed himself in, skipped in front of the line, and annoyed the hell out of the people already squeezed inside. All because he had spotted an HR specialist in the elevator who worked at a company he wanted to COOP at.

Turns out Mohammed had been spending his breaks moving from one floor to another, bugging receptionists for leads or referral opportunities. And once he was done with one company, the next day he would go one floor up to the next, and so on. I respected the ambition, but without shame, it quickly became invasive.

What struck me was not that he was ambitious, but that his ambition met no friction. Most people are checked by something before they overstep: an instinct for proportion, timing, or the simple possibility of embarrassment. Mohammed seemed to lack that completely. And once that inner resistance disappears, what remains is not confidence, but a person who no longer knows when to stop.

We have been taught to treat shame as damage and confidence as liberation. But the modern script is almost childish in the way it flatters boldness. It assumes that the less you care, the freer you are. Be unapologetic. Take space. Ask. Insist. Go after what you want. What it misses is that a certain amount of shame is not weakness, but civilization. It is part of what keeps human beings from becoming socially grotesque.

But a civilized person is not simply someone with less fear. A civilized person is someone with friction. Someone with inner resistance. Someone whose impulses meet a filter before they become behavior. That is why shame is interesting. Not humiliation. Not self-hatred. But shame as an internal braking system.

Last weekend, I joined my father on a short hunting trip to Al-rass, my hometown. We spent the night at the farm and woke up to a beautiful morning, a cold breeze, and a summer cloud drifting above us, raining lightly every now and then. Later, we met up with my father’s old buddies, the same ones he used to hunt with back in the mid-80s. After catching up, we hopped into the 4x4s, got the Remington 11-87 ready and loaded, and went after the Tawny Pipit, a migratory bird that comes down from Southern Europe to winter in the Arabian Peninsula. A few minutes in, we spotted a flock that kept flushing ahead of us, so we followed quietly, waiting for the moment they would finally settle.

My father’s buddy kept urging him to take the shot, but he kept holding back. It did not strike me as fear or hesitation. It felt more like distance, as if he were sitting in front of something that had once been a bigger part of his life, but no longer fit into it the same way it used to. The gun was there, the landscape was familiar, the company was the same, but he had long been shaped by a different rhythm.

From the back seat, I felt like I was sitting behind two different ways of living, each with its own logic, each asking for something different in return. My father’s buddy had stayed close to that world. The hobby stayed, the friendships stayed, and so did the kind of pace that still left room for both. For him, life had remained something to inhabit, not something to constantly optimize. There was a simplicity to it, but not the empty kind. More like a life that had managed to preserve its shape.

My father chose a different path. He moved to the States, pursued his education, kept building, and answered the kind of life that asks for more each time you give it something. It gives back too, of course. It gives speed, ambition, movement, and the sense that your life is expanding with you. But sitting behind him, I could also feel what it takes. Not failure. Not regret. Just the quiet trade-offs of a life fully lived in one direction, and the distance that direction can create from the other parts of yourself.

The real trade-off is not simply money versus comfort, or ambition versus laziness. It is deeper than that. One kind of life pulls you into speed, pressure, and constant becoming, but often by consuming the time and inner stillness that make a life feel like your own. The other may ask you to accept a smaller horizon and a slower rhythm, but in return it gives you something the first life quietly takes from you: presence, autonomy, and enough of yourself left to actually feel your life while you are in it.

On the drive back to Riyadh, I found myself eager to return to the city again. Its speed still excites me. Its noise still pulls me in. I am not dreaming of leaving it all behind for a farm in Al-rass. But that morning gave me something clearer than escape. It showed me that my stroke is neither life. Not a life spent chasing pace, and not one spent withdrawing from it. I want to live freely and fully, to move through the world on my own terms, without letting its charm, its speed, or its demands decide the shape of my life for me. I do not want life to happen to me. I want to stand over it, shape it, and make it answer to me.

If you had only bothered to glance out the window, you would’ve known the plane hadn’t parked yet. Still, I began hearing seatbelts unbuckle, people rising from their seats, hands reaching for the overhead compartments, backs hunched forward, and before long, the aisle was packed.

From my seat, the whole scene was absurd. People neatly dressed and perfectly presentable, yet the moment stillness was required, they gave in to the same restless instinct, rising all at once like a flock startled for no reason. With the doors still sealed, where exactly did they think they were going?

Once the doors opened, I took a quick look at the first person leading the herd, pulling his carry-on in a rush and looking tense beneath his blue MLB Yankees cap. I stayed calmly in my seat, letting the herd pass, and only then did I stand, take my carry-on, and leave.

By the time I reached baggage claim, the bags were just starting to come down. As I stood waiting for mine, I spotted the man in the blue cap. He was the first to leave, and I was one of the last, yet we still ended up leaving the airport at the same time. He went through all that rush for nothing.

The interesting part was never the rush itself, but how effortlessly one person’s unnecessary movement became everyone else’s decision. What looked like impatience was really cowardice in a more socially acceptable form. No one on that plane needed to stand, yet the moment a few people did, the rest surrendered their judgment and followed. Herds form everywhere: in trends, in public opinion, in the career paths people borrow from one another. A herd is rarely formed by logic, but by people too afraid to make their own decisions and live by them. They find reassurance in imitation, comfort in numbers, and, as the Arabic saying goes, “الموت مع الجماعة أرحم”.

Under the gazebo, the atmosphere shifted. Formalities stayed behind in the majlis. We slipped into easy conversation, catching up with cousins we had missed. This is what I love about Ramadan. For eleven months of the year, we are scattered across countries, each pursuing his own path. Weekends at my grandfather’s are never full: someone is always missing. Then Ramadan arrives, and suddenly you are fighting for a parking spot at family iftars where you would normally park at the front door.

Just when the conversation was getting good, my uncle, one of the family’s most respected figures, came to the gazebo himself and asked us to join them in the main majlis. We all preferred the casual, unfiltered conversation we were having, but the request was non-negotiable, so we moved. It was packed, and I had always resented the hierarchy of conversation there: the uncles spoke, and we became an audience.

I had always viewed these gatherings as a chance to reconnect and have meaningful conversations. So what was the point of sitting in a place where the microphone seemed selectively handed out while everyone else sat and listened? I stepped out to take a call, and when I returned, I paused at the entrance and took a moment to look at everyone. That was when I noticed something I had missed. The older generation was not dominating the conversation. They were carrying it. More importantly, while the younger generation was quiet, we were not excluded. We were its intended audience

Back in my seat, they were discussing an unexpected crossing in the family tree. The story pulled me in. Then the conversation drifted into old stories and family history. When I finally began to listen and let go of my need to speak, I found myself genuinely enjoying the majlis I had once resented.

I had been dismissing a private invitation, one quietly designed to nurture, guide, and enlighten us with knowledge we would never acquire in our private schools or internet archives. We know how to search, but not how to receive. We have access to endless information, yet little patience for wisdom that arrives slowly through stories, repetition, elders, and presence.

I thought value lived where I felt most engaged, most expressive, most heard. That night taught me otherwise. Some things are only given to those who know how to sit long enough to receive them, before rushing to offer something of their own.