Flow Lines #4

Hey there,

I love a good sauna… when I choose to step into one. But lately, Lisbon has turned my house into a suffocating greenhouse, with this heat wave pushing temperatures past 33°C and air hanging heavy even after midnight. It's hard to believe these extremes used to be rare. Now they're our new normal.

On My Mind

It's getting harder to see where reality ends and its reflection begins. Not just in the obvious places like AI-generated images, Instagram filters, deepfakes, but in the everyday ways life is staged.

Parents curate their children’s childhoods for future storytelling rather than present joy, “passion projects” are designed for the podcast interview, and clubbers film what used to be underground to franchise it rather than experience it. These days, we live for the retelling.

I remember reading Baudrillard's hyperreality concept as a young sociology student. The copy doesn't just imitate reality but becomes our reality. It resonated with me at the time.

Now I see it everywhere: Moon cycles become brand assets, spiritual retreats are staged for social media, sacred practices turn into content. Yes, even the spiritual gets commoditized, packaged into bite-sized wisdom for consumption. The healing has become the hooking, with each sacred practice optimized for our next dopamine rush.

The truth is, hyperreality isn't going away. But we can (still) choose how much of our time, attention, and spirit we allow it to claim. We can be intentional about what we let in, what we create, and where we simply step away.

Worth Sharing

The Competition Between Stubbornness And Fragility

When my friend Fateme recommended this talk, I wasn’t prepared for what I was about to hear. In The Competition Between Stubbornness and Fragility, war photographer Giles Duley, who lost both legs and an arm in Afghanistan, shares a raw story of resilience. Refusing to let go of his identity, he told his doctors, “I’m still a photographer,” and returned to work in less than 18 months. It’s a masterclass in refusing to let circumstances define you.

The AI Will See You Now

Paul Sherman tells the compelling story of how a half hour with a fictional AI therapist transformed his 25-year relationship with a buried trauma. Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) principles, a therapeutic approach that fascinates me and connects with my mentoring practice, he found relief and a way to meet his pain on his own terms.

What is especially interesting is when he flipped the roles, becoming therapist to AI “characters” like gods, vampires, and soldiers, and discovering that teaching and guiding them deepened his own healing.

Caution: I’m not advocating AI for therapy, and there are many cases of things going wrong. Read at your own peril.

China's Future City Theater

I've been watching friends get swept up in the China hype lately. The TikToks of high-speed trains, the viral videos of robot servers, the breathless posts about "15-minute cities" make Western infrastructure look like it's held together with duct tape.

It's compelling theater, and like most theater, it's designed to create a specific feeling.

Noah Smith's piece on Sinofuturism cuts through the performance to show what's actually happening. A country pivoting hard from a real estate crash to advanced manufacturing, amplifying every shiny success through state-backed influencer campaigns while Western struggles make any alternative look attractive.

But here's what strikes me most about this future city narrative: it's another layer of hyperreality. The "China of tomorrow" becomes more real than China itself. The gated high-rise microdistricts behind the gleaming facades? Sprawling and isolating. The demographic decline? Still there. The censorship limiting cultural influence? Still there.

I'm not anti-China or pro-anyone else. I'm just fascinated by how we keep building these perfect futures in our heads, then getting surprised when reality is messier, more human, more complicated than the story we've been sold.

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Yousuke Yukimatsu is an Osaka DJ who left construction work in 2016 after a brain cancer diagnosis to pursue music full-time. Known for his chaotic, hyper-eclectic sets that jump from free jazz to gabber to house, his 2025 Boiler Room Tokyo performance went viral with 12 million views in six months.

This isn't my usual musical territory, and I'm generally resistant to hype. But when someone operates with this kind of creative anarchy, I can't look away.

Your Turn

In my last Cozy Session, the dinners I organize with people from different walks of life: how is your relationship with endings? And what makes an ending “good”?

In Portugal, some people wear black for life after losing a partner, carrying their loss as a constant presence. Others celebrate the life lived, turning grief into gratitude.

The same questions come with any type of ending: do you sit with the story and turn it over in your mind, or do you move on quickly? And does either path make you a better or worse person?

This applies to everything: failed projects, cities you've left behind, versions of yourself you've outgrown, creative work that didn't land the way you hoped. Some people process endings by revisiting them, extracting every lesson, honoring what was. Others close the chapter and move forward without looking back.

Here, there are no answers, just an invitation to reflect on your life’s endings.

Words That Resonate

“I have one thousand friends and nobody to feed my cat.”
—Esther Perel

I don't even have a cat, and honestly, I count myself lucky that someone would feed mine if I did. But this line lands hard. It says a lot about our times. In so many of my conversations (and maybe yours too), there's this relentless urge to connect, to stay plugged in, but the deep, messy kind of connection feels more elusive than ever.

The Many Selves We Wear

Some of us shift between different modes, even within our chosen field(s). We might teach, build, and lead, often all in the same week. These different shapes we take aren't just quirks; they're often essential. Without variety, many of us get restless.

These multiple modes become powerful assets, connecting dots in unexpected ways. But here's the tension: as we age, we grow more selective about which parts of ourselves we're willing to articulate and explain to others.

Do we grow tired of being misunderstood, or does wisdom simply teach us when explanation isn't worth the effort? Or maybe it's simpler than that: we just say fuck it and move to a different room, one where people feel the energy without needing the translation.

Stay strong, Gus