About
I wanted the hustle. The achievement.
The drive and ambition that drove extreme productivity, passion, and even an unhealthy level of obsession.
In my mind, being around people building something they care about was the closest I could be to feeling truly alive. And I pursued it. I vouched for it. I lived it myself for over seven years.
I've always had a very introspective personality. I did every personality test I could find. I meditated daily and tried to keep a journal. There was something I was constantly searching for inside myself - I just couldn't understand what. Meditation, in particular, gave me access to a feeling of peace I could never feel in the rest of my life. I became obsessed with it. And as that peace deepened, something else became impossible to ignore: the comparison between how I felt in stillness and how I felt at work and in my life.
Work started to feel overly stressful and irritating. I felt like I was wasting my life away. The more I craved the peace I knew existed, the more I resented everything competing with it. There were so many things I wanted to do - to create, to think, to experience - but I'd be too depleted after work to get anything meaningful done.
So my real life started at 10 pm. I had from ten until one in the morning to do the things I actually cared about, because everything before that belonged to someone else. I worked hard, every single day, and yet had nothing to show for myself. The resentment built slowly, for no one in particular but the shape of my days - that feeling that I was wasting my life living on someone else's terms. Burnout, probably - but the word didn't fully fit. It was less about exhaustion and more about a specific wrongness that I couldn't name.
Then I doubled down on looking inward. I truly wanted to understand myself. I read everything I could find about how humans - how I - work. How we make decisions, where our values actually come from, and why we keep doing things that don't serve us. I needed to know why I felt so stuck despite doing everything I was supposed to do.
What I found was not what I expected. For example, the values and dreams I held felt like mine, but the deeper I looked, the more I could see how much of them had been shaped by the culture I grew up in, the environments I'd spent my time in, the reward systems I'd been navigating for years, and the success stories I wanted to be able to tell myself and others. They weren't what would actually make me feel happy and fulfilled.
What I actually wanted was peace and the freedom to be fully myself, with all my quirks, random hobbies, and imperfections. The knowing that I'm living my life true to myself and the feeling that everything I do is in alignment with who I actually am, not who I was rewarded for being.
Self-inquiry eventually led me to run small experiments in my own life. The 10pm - 1am projects that were already happening in the background became more deliberate. I tried things I'd filtered out for years because they didn't fit the identity I'd been carrying. I gave myself permission to explore what kinds of work actually put me in a flow state - what felt like expression versus what felt like performance. What a day looked like when it was built around my actual wiring rather than someone else's designed structures. I finally stopped believing that my identity is what I do for work and I stopped accepting that my real life starts outside of work hours, when I finally get back the energy and space to be the person I want to be.
When I began working on projects I was actually interested in rather than what I was given, I became motivated in a completely different way. The work I do to build something of my own is harder in many ways than anything I did as part of my job, but it doesn't feel like a grind, because it's mine. From me and for me.
And at some point in that process, I finally left the full-time role. My options on the table. Without a plan B. Not dramatically, of course - I'd been preparing the ground for a long time. I saved the money. I did small experiments with the time I had - enough to know what kinds of things li like doing, so I wouldn't start from zero. My problem no longer was that I didn't know who I was, but that I knew too much, wanted too many things, and found myself stuck in a misalignment that was no longer bearable. The self-discovery gave me that by showing me what was real underneath everything I'd accumulated - both in my career and my personal life. So the gift that I decided to give to myself was the energy and time I needed to explore what it actually takes for me to be and experience the world being fully me.
But I want to be precise about what this wasn't. It was not a rejection of employment and not some manifesto about working for myself. I left because the specific structures I'd chosen so far couldn't give me what I needed. Not because employment as such can't, there are quite a few companies I think I'd love to be a part of in the future, but because I realised that I don't want to get stuck somewhere where I can't thrive or be fully myself.
IKIGLOO is a real-life experiment, built in public. It's my attempt to create a peace-led life built on deep self-knowledge and share what I find along the way. Will this lead me to a lifestyle I'm seeking? The time will show.
IKIGLOO is a name born from two worlds:
Ikigai, the Japanese concept about finding what makes life feel worth living. Or in other words, the thing that gets you out of bed. And Igloo - a shelter you build with your own hands, that keeps you warm when everything outside is freezing.
Put together, we get something quite beautiful - the idea that you can build a life that actually means something to you, brick by brick, with what you've got. It's about your inner world meeting your outer work. The part of you that knows and the part that builds. The vision and the hands. The dream and the doing.
IKIGLOO thus is not about creating a perfect life that you'd want to showcase in your highlight reel, but about knowing who you are and what truly matters to you so you could build a life that fits and feels right.
The gap between the life we're living and the one that actually fits us is due to a lack of self-knowledge. Most life coaching & life design frameworks start with what we want from life, but IKIGLOO asks whether we know ourselves well enough to answer that question correctly.
Three simple ideas at the centre of everything
These are theories that IKIGLOO, as an experiment, is testing. The science behind each one is real, but the lived experience is being tested in real time.
The self-knowledge gap
Peace is not what we build toward, but what we build from. When we feel aligned and do the things that match who we actually are, motivation arrives naturally and in abundance. The drive, the ambition, the passion: these don't disappear when we find peace - we simply start aiming them at the correct things.
A life well-lived is in the process, not a destination. It consists of finding the right balance across all areas we care about - work, relationships, environment, daily life - and that balance is deeply personal. When we know ourselves, we know what shape our life needs to take to make it worth living.
Peace as foundation
Balance is personal
A meaningful and fulfilling life is made up of simple, little pleasures that make our heart skip a beat - like the sheer joy of running barefoot on a sandy beach or dipping our feet in a lake on a warm summer evening. It’s those early mornings in spring when the sun greets us with a smile and the serene winter evenings when the world falls silent.
OUR PHILOSOPHY
Key beliefs
A life well-lived is person-specific and requires experimentation.
Self-knowledge is the most practical thing a person can do when it comes to life design.
Peace is not the reward at the end, but the ground to build from.
Vision
A world where people make the most important decisions of their lives - what to do, who to be with, where to live, and how to spend their time - from a place of genuine self-knowledge rather than inherited expectation. Where peace is understood not as a reward for getting things right, but as the foundation from which good lives are built.
Mission
We want to provide tools, information, and resources that helps people understand themselves well enough to build lives that are truly theirs across work, relationships, environment, and everything else that matters.
A space for people figuring out what to do with their lives by getting to know themselves better and by actually trying things.
Get in Touch
@IKIGLOO
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Blueprint to Being is a newsletter about living a life that fits who you are through self-knowledge and intentional life design. If this resonates with you, subscribe below.
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