My father’s side of the family is enormous, as is to be expected from an Arab family. My father had 11 siblings growing up, and each of these siblings had an average of 4 children. This meant that while I lived in the Middle East I came into contact with all my aunts and uncles, and countless cousins as well. What I learned from this large family dynamic was that as my family members got older there were elevated responsibilities that came on their shoulders. When parents aged, the oldest children took on the responsibility of taking that parental mantle…

A few years ago, I was going down a YouTube rabbit hole. We’ve all done this before, you watch a few videos and then start getting drawn into the recommendations. Well, this particular rabbit hole led to me learning about minimalism as a lifestyle and why it makes so much sense to live certain aspects of life this way. This push to minimalism even extends to my phone, where I like to avoid clutter on my phone and often delete apps that I haven’t used in a few months.

I don’t think that I am the only person that has…

I grew up on the east coast of the United States and have spent the majority of my adult life in the midwest. And I remember the first time that I visited the west coast for a business trip, a few friends of mine that had lived in Southern California told me that I had to try In-N-Out Burger. They told me that it is by far the best fast food burger you could ever have. My skepticism rose as I thought how good could a fast-food hamburger really be? It was not just the quality of the food that…

There is a song by the alternative band Garbage that is called “The World Is Not Enough” (music video here). In the video, lead singer Shirley Manson is depicted as a sort of cyborg that is being perfected only to be devised as an explosive device that is capable of murdering people by touch. The video and the message are powerful and a commentary on the nature of man, of wanting more from life. That the idea of perfection becomes inferior to the delusions of grandeur portrayed by the mind. On a less extreme level, there are companies that demand…

Sometimes there can be too much of a good thing. In the United States, we enjoy the benefit of having a plethora of options. Go into a grocery store and there are 5 different options of the item you might be buying. But there are times when there is an overabundance of options that creates confusion, which is not good for anyone. This is the situation that we find ourselves in in the smartphone world. Every company has multiple phones that slightly iterate year after year, not offering much in the way of an improvement. Yet there are tweaks to…

It is a running joke with my friends and family that I own a new phone every month. It is a funny joke, because like all good jokes it is rooted in a bit of truth. Confession: I have owned over 100 different phones in a span of 15 years. I can’t give a proper explanation as to why I enjoy trying new tech other than I am genuinely interested in the product and want to try everything at least once. I have owned phones from almost every manufacturer that you can think of that is sold here in the…

As we grow older, we will often yearn for life as it was when we were younger. This much is evidenced whenever a throwback food item makes a comeback and the internet freaks out to try a bit of nostalgia. A bit of nostalgia on a higher level I have always reminisced over is the boutique niche shop. The idea of a place that is only selling a group of products for a specific customer as opposed to the one-size-fits-all approach of the superstore culture in modern society. This norm of uniformity has permeated into many aspects of modern life…

Remember when every laptop that was sold commercially had a DVD/CD disc drive? It was great because you could take your DVD collection and watch some movies on an airplane for however long your massive laptop’s battery could last. It is a feature that felt like an expected one on every laptop until all of a sudden it wasn’t. Going into your local Best Buy these days and trying to find a laptop with a disk drive is an exercise in futility. The reason for this? The MacBook Air. Apple showed the appeal of the ultra-thin laptop and the public…