Why I started this…
Everywhere you look, someone is selling certainty. In politics. In culture. In the media. In professional life. Everyone has a story about what is happening, what it means, and what side you should be on.
The stories arrive faster than the understanding. The performance arrives faster than the thinking. And most of us are left reacting to a world that feels loud and thin at the same time.
I do not believe clarity works that way.
I was born in Karachi, raised in Dubai, and now live in California. That path did not give me an identity. It gave me distance. Distance from simple stories. Distance from inherited confidence. Distance from the idea that any one place, culture, or system has the world figured out.
When you grow up moving through different worlds, you learn quickly that what feels obvious in one place is invisible in another. You start to notice how much of what we call belief is just the air of the room we happen to be standing in.
That habit never left me.
Over time, I became more interested in how people think than in what they think. In how incentives bend behavior. In how narratives flatten nuance. In how belonging quietly distorts judgment. In how the medium changes the message before the message even has a chance. In how people outsource their thinking and then defend the result as if it were their own.
Most of the arguments we watch today are not really about ideas. They are performances of certainty. They exist to signal who belongs where. They exist to resolve discomfort, not to increase understanding. The tension is always closed too quickly. The story is always too clean. The conclusion arrives before anyone has really looked at what is happening. It’s formulaic.
This is the fog.
A Fogwalker is not someone who is looking for a way out but someone who refuses to pretend there is a way out.
This publication is my attempt to practice that refusal in public.
Here you will find essays about the things we are all living inside. Culture. Media. Institutions. Everyday behavior.
You will find reviews of books, films, and television that are not written to rank them or market them, but to understand what they are really doing to us and with us. You will find reflections that do not rush to resolve themselves because some questions are only useful if you let them stay open.
I am not here to tell you what to think. I am here to slow the world down long enough to notice what is shaping your thinking before you get to it. To trace the forces beneath the surface of what we read, watch, argue about, and live inside. To build orientation in a world that keeps rewarding reaction.
My beliefs are not complicated. The world is more complex than the stories we are given about it.
Clarity is rare because it is uncomfortable. Expertise matters, but authority often lies. The instinct to belong quietly distorts how people think.
I write because I don’t want to live life sleepwalking.
First essay drops on New Year’s Day at midnight.