The Nomad is a growing collection of stories, fascinations, encounters, observations, lived moments — and the quiet (and not-so-quiet) joy hidden inside them.
They’re all rooted in my life, wandering freely between places, people, questions, and unexpected turns. Many of these stories eventually find their way into my book The Nomad — others insist on staying a little wild. Stay tuned. The road is still unfolding.
Conditioning is living with curtains you never knew were there.
Most of us grow up inside systems — family, school, culture, expectation — that shape what feels normal, possible, and true, long before we are old enough to question any of it. We adapt. We perform. We meet expectations and move forward. And for a long time, this works perfectly well. That, as I write in The Nomad, is precisely the trap.
For years I mistook ease for alignment and opportunity for choice. I had a good childhood, opportunities opened at the right moments, many things worked in my favour. It would have been easy to call that luck. But luck is a lazy explanation. What I was doing — what most of us do — was following tracks I had learned without ever choosing them. The script was already written. I was simply performing it well.
Conditioning is not dramatic. It doesn’t announce itself. It looks like competence, like stability, like a life that works. It feels like common sense. That is what makes it so difficult to see — and so important to name.
The moment I began to recognise my own conditioning — really see it, not just intellectually understand it — something shifted. Not all at once. Not in a straight line. But again and again, what I call “cuts” appeared: moments when staying the same no longer made sense, when something familiar had to be left behind so that something truer could emerge. Each cut was an act of perception. Each one made the next one a little more possible.
This is not a comfortable process. It requires sitting with discomfort, with the gap between the life you have built and the life that feels true. It requires honesty — about the flaws, the contradictions, the things you have been quietly concealing even from yourself. What comes from that honesty is not loss. It is the freedom of choosing your own path. Not freedom from all limits — but freedom from the limits you never consciously accepted. There is a difference between a cage you chose to enter and one you never knew you were in.
And here is what I believe most urgently: this is not only a personal matter.
The conditioning that shapes individuals is the same mechanism that shapes societies. The same algorithms that decide what we see, what we think, who we are — are doing to communities and democracies what upbringing, culture and expectation do to individuals. The crisis of the self and the crisis of our political moment are not separate crises. They are the same crisis, playing out at different scales.
When individuals do the work of seeing their own conditioning clearly — when they stop performing the self others expect and start living from something truer — they become harder to manipulate. They ask different questions. They make different choices. They build different things. A society of people who have done this inward work is a society that is genuinely harder to condition from the outside — by algorithms, by propaganda, by the relentless pressure to adapt, optimise and fit.
The walk out of conditioning is not a luxury. It is not self-indulgence. It is, I believe, one of the most urgent and political acts available to any of us right now.
The curtains are there. The question is whether we are willing to see them.
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