Unfortunately, I am not going to share a full essay this week. Normally, I was planning to write about the three questions psychotherapy stole from medicine (and how we can use them in our lives), but my graduation is due in a couple of weeks, and I have some hard work waiting for me. Anyway,… Continue reading
Especially the good ones. I don’t think this question requires an intro because we’ve all been there. We all have secrets. 97% of people have at least one secret, but on average, a person has 13 concurrent secrets, five of which they have never told a single person. Sounds quite reasonable. Sometimes we f*ck up…. Continue reading
This week, I am reading The Art of Living by one of the most essential names in Stoicism, Epictetus. He was born into slavery in present-day Pamukkale, Turkey. His name also means “acquired,” as he was a property under Roman law. As an enslaved person, his leg was tortured and broken by his owner, making… Continue reading
As an antidote to “time anxiety”… For the last couple of years, I’ve been experimenting with various time management techniques to “optimize” my time and, honestly, to do too many things at once. Among those techniques, I’ve mostly tried different versions of time blocking — where you block a time spot to do a specific… Continue reading
To be or to do? A short story about ego This week, I want to talk about a story that I read from Ryan Holiday’s best-selling book, Ego is the Enemy. For some reason, this story just stuck with me. A Turkish saying describes lessons from stories like this: Let it be an earring to… Continue reading
I didn’t have the chance to write much this week, so this will be a short post. Actually, I will steal a habit from Stoics to justify the length of this blog post. It’s a common Stoic practice to journal, meditate, reflect upon, and apply philosophical principles to real life. They believed that the repetition… Continue reading
I have struggled to write blog posts in Turkish for the last few weeks. Although the most obvious reason is that I have not lived in Turkey for the previous 2.5 years, I don’t believe this is the case. I think not reading enough Turkish literature caused the more-than-necessary stalls while writing. So, to improve… Continue reading
A warning against the psychological warfare in the attention economy. Recently, I read “How to Think Like Socrates” by Donald Robertson, a cognitive behavioral therapist and author of high-quality books on Stoicism. In this book, he connects the Socratic way of thinking with modern psychology while trying to give a semi-fictional historical account of Socrates… Continue reading
I was in a good rhythm of publishing blog posts in two languages for the last few weeks. Then, life happened, as I expected to be at some point. My bachelor’s thesis proved to be more time-consuming than I’d admit, and some other issues required my attention and time. Today, I’d like to mention two… Continue reading
Last year, I was walking with my uncle in Frankfurt along the Main river in Germany, which goes through Frankfurt. As we had been walking for 20 kilometers, he wanted to rest. As we sat, he mentioned a story emphasizing the importance of taking rests regularly. So I tracked down the source of this story,… Continue reading