No Expiration Date

And I’m still on both. Years ago, I wrote something down that has stayed with me ever since. Life is as much an internal journey as it is an external one. At the time it felt like an observation. Now it feels like the most accurate map I have ever drawn. What Do You Want? It sounds like a simple question. It is not. I have been asking it for most of my adult life and the answer has never stayed still. At different stages it has looked like: a specific job title, a graduate degree, living abroad, seeing a particular corner of the world, learning a new sport, signing up for a triathlon because something in me needed to know if I could. And then at other times – quieter times, more honest times – the answer has looked like: to be happy. To be at peace. To sit comfortably in solitude. To understand what I actually feel, not just what I am supposed to feel. To be a better person than I was last year. To deepen my gratitude. To keep my empathy intact in a world that quietly discourages it. T...

I have written on this blog about the world; about inequality, about empathy, about the kind of people who show up fully and the rarity of finding them. Today I am writing about one person specifically. The one who made me believe all of those things were worth writing about in the first place. This is for my sister. I Am Because She Is There is no cleaner way to say it than that. Not because I don't exist independently. Not because I can't stand on my own. But because who I am. The parts of me I am most proud of, the version of myself I return to when I've drifted, was shaped in the presence of another person. Reflected back at me. Held up even when I couldn't hold it myself. That person is Nathalie. She is my twin, my best friend, and the only human being on earth who has been present for every chapter of my life without exception. Not just the highlight reel. All of it. The things I would tell anyone, and the things I would tell almost no one. People talk about findi...

  A tribute to Dr. Saeed Mekbel — and to everyone who stands on shoulders they can never fully repay. Some people leave a mark on the world with their name on a building. Others leave it in the way their grandchildren move through life; the standards they hold themselves to, the things they refuse to settle for, the quiet voice in the back of their head that says  you can do more, go further, don't stop here. My grandfather left both. It Started With a Woman and a Bag Before there was Dr. Saeed Mekbel, there was his mother. A Lebanese immigrant who arrived in Costa Rica with nothing but a bag, two children, and a determination that history rarely records but always depends on. She didn't speak the language. She had no education to speak of, no connections, no safety net. What she had was the particular ferocity of a woman who had decided that her children's lives would be different from her own. She learned Spanish. She built a life. And then her youngest was born: the fift...

A question more of us are asking than we admit. There is a particular kind of person who moves through the world a little differently. They notice things others don't. They replay conversations afterward, not out of insecurity, but out of genuine care about how their words landed. They walk into a room and read the emotional temperature within minutes. They lose sleep over things that most people around them have already forgotten. And at some point, almost all of them ask the same question:  is something wrong with me, or is something wrong with everyone else? The answer, it turns out, is neither. But getting there takes a while. What We Carry Without Knowing It Most of us don't spend much time thinking about how we were shaped. It's easier to think of ourselves as self-made, as individuals who arrived at our values through logic and choice. But the truth is messier and more tender than that. The way you were raised leaves a mark that goes deeper than memory. Whether love ...

And I can't stop thinking about it. I grew up in Latin America. I have lived in Canada, the UK, the United States. I have sat in rooms with policymakers, economists, and executives talking about the future of energy, of markets, of technology. I have also walked streets where that future feels very, very far away. And somewhere in the middle of all of it is my mother's voice. She had a particular way of moving through the world - eyes open, always. She didn't let us look away from things just because they were uncomfortable. She pointed out the woman on the corner. She asked questions at the dinner table that had no easy answers. She installed something in us - a kind of awareness that I didn't always know what to do with when I was young, but that gets louder with every passing year. Lately, it's deafening. The most extraordinary and most unsettling moment of our lives I work in economics. I follow macro trends for a living. I track what's happening in ma...

A thought a lot of us keep coming back to, no matter how many times we try to leave it alone. There is a certain kind of life that looks, from the outside, exactly like it's supposed to. Good education. Graduate degree. A respectable career. The kind of CV that signals competence and stability - the white collar job, the benefits package, the ability to pay rent and take a trip once in a while. The measurable markers of a life on track. And for many people who have built that life, there is genuine pride in it. Real effort went into it. Real things were earned. But quietly, often late at night or in the middle of a conversation they're only half present for, a question surfaces that doesn't go away: Did I choose this? Or did I just follow the formula? The Formula Is Real. That's the Problem. Here is something most people don't say out loud: for a certain subset of the population, professional success was never really that extraordinary. Not to say it wasn't earn...