This is not a year-end piece. I feel compelled to say this upfront because what follows might accidentally resemble one—gratitude, reflection, a glance backward before stepping forward. But I've never written these seasonal rituals, and I don't intend to start now. Those who do have their reasons, and I even enjoy reading some of them. Especially those with reading recaps. I've just never felt drawn to writing them myself—the obligation to be retrospective on command, the pressure to package months into meaning on schedule.

What this is, then, is something else: a recognition of serendipity. A word I love, one that has no direct equivalent in Portuguese. I use it advisedly, since it names precisely what cannot be planned—the fortunate accidents that sometimes organise themselves into meaning only when seen in retrospect.

a sequence of accidents

A collaboration with the House of Beautiful Business led me to write an essay called "On the Beauty of Distraction." I didn't think much of it at the time—it was an exercise, a conversation, one among many. As always, the editing process with the HoBB team was wonderful, and they bettered my writing immensely. Then iA created their first writing award, and for reasons I still don't fully understand, I applied. That essay won, catching me off-guard.

The recognition gave me something I didn't know I needed: courage. For years I had circled around the idea of writing in English, approaching it twice with book projects that never materialised. The award wasn't permission—nobody needs permission to write—but it was a kind of evidence. Perhaps what I wanted to say might find readers beyond Portuguese.

So I started this publication. In February. Which, if we're tracking the calendar, makes this almost a year.

Here's another accident that enabled this: large language models became useful to me in a specific, limited way. I should be precise, given what I've written elsewhere about these systems. I don't use them to think or to write. I use them to edit—to catch the errors that come from writing in a language that isn't native to me.

The distance between what I mean and what I write in English has always required a bridge: a patient native speaker willing to untangle my Latinate constructions, to flag the preposition I've misused, the idiom I've mangled. These editors are expensive, and their availability rarely coincides with the moment of writing. LLMs changed this specific equation. For catching grammatical slips, for smoothing awkward phrasing, for the mechanical labour of proofreading—they suffice. I still reserve human editors for texts that require genuine understanding rather than pattern matching.^[1]

There's a tension here, and I won't pretend otherwise. I've criticised the way these systems flatten language, homogenise thought, complete the circuit of individualisation by eliminating friction. That critique stands. But a tool used for proofreading isn't the same as a tool used for thinking. A spell-checker doesn't write your sentences; neither does a more sophisticated version of one. The ideas remain mine. The errors in judgement, too.

unexpected conversations

Here is what I did not expect: conversations. Wonderful ones, with people in places I never expected to reach, about ideas I thought only interested me. The email thread with a reader from Copenhagen who challenged my thinking on uncertainty. The exchange with someone in Amsterdam who found in my essays a vocabulary for what they'd been feeling but couldn't name. The message from a reader in Germany, where apparently my Portuguese-inflected thoughts on productivity made surprising sense.

And then: podcasts. Ben Lehnert invited me to Poets & Thinkers, where I had my first conversation about these ideas in English, unmediated by text. It's already out, and I can report that I didn't embarrass myself entirely. Another invitation followed—which would never have happened without the publication that wouldn't have existed without the award that came from an essay I wrote almost by accident.

From conversations, collaborations. One emerged spontaneously this year, with a friend, over messages exchanged after I wrote about forgetting to write; two more are brewing. No timelines, no deliverables—as it should be. When you stop planning, things have a way of planning themselves.

Serendipity. That's the word.

what comes next

All this momentum—a word I use reluctantly, since it suggests a physics I don't experience—led somewhere else. I am writing a book. It will be in Portuguese first, because that's where thinking feels most native. But I hope it will be translated. Almost every piece in the manuscript started here, in this newsletter that calls itself useless while functioning, paradoxically, as something rather useful.

The book is about post-depth. About the plasticisation of profundity. About what happens when wisdom itself becomes a product. It is an expansion of what I've been circling in these essays, given enough room to breathe and contradict itself. If it finds its way into English, you'll hear about it.

This is not a year-end piece. But if it were, it would end here: with gratitude for accidents, for readers who stay, for the strange luck of writing something and having it find people who wanted to read exactly that.

It would not end with promises about next year, or resolutions, or the strategic ambitions of a publication. It would end, instead, with this: thank you for reading. For paying attention—that precious resource that we gift, or lend, or pay, depending on which language speaks us.

The paradox continues. So do I.