How Do I Create and Inhabit the Conditions Through Which I Am Able to Flourish?
Since I reached an unequivocal clarity about my life vision — to live a life of longevity and vitality — I have continued to approach that vision by cultivating my architectural way of seeing, perceiving and inhabiting the world.
Knowing my old wiring towards heuristic thinking, together with my inherent tendency to multitask, I have consciously designed much of my life around two interconnected dimensions — health and vitality — not simply because they enhance my physical and cognitive capacity, but because they deepen my experience of life and allow me to live fully.
Earlier in 2026, I wrote a dense piece titled How Do You Want to Live Your Life?, which offered an intimate gaze into my evolving journey as an architect of my own life: how I construct systems and infrastructure to support my life vision, align with my values and protect the identity I have spent years deliberately building. Since then, I have continued to experiment with what it actually means to design a life around longevity and vitality, and I have gradually reached another point of self-audit and re-evaluation.
I have become increasingly interested in what happens when a single mindset begins to manifest across all areas of life, producing a ripple effect across nutrition, exercise, skincare, cognition, creativity, and ultimately my inhabitation of space and environment. What initially appear to be disparate strands gradually begin to converge. And in this convergence, one word keeps resurfacing: nourishing.
I feel compelled to distil the small elements that have genuinely cast a spell on me — viscerally and existentially. They may appear insignificant when considered individually, yet collectively they have gradually altered the way I perceive, think, choose and inhabit my life. Over time, these elements have become woven into the fabric of my life. And eventually, I found myself arriving at a new inquiry:
How do I create and inhabit the conditions through which I am able to flourish?
This time, however, I am approaching the question from two dimensions: the conditions I deliberately create, and how I inhabit them when those conditions inevitably fluctuate.
At a broader level, we can design systems, routines and environments that support the way we want to live. Yet there are moments when those carefully designed conditions no longer perform exactly as intended — when the body interrupts our plans, when our cognitive and creative bandwidth declines, when a routine is disrupted, and when life occasionally throws us off balance.
That is where my thinking has begun to shift: from optimisation towards inhabitation.
Perhaps flourishing is therefore not simply the outcome of having designed everything flawlessly. It is equally dependent on how we inhabit conditions when they fluctuate, and how we continue to nurture ourselves through the undulating rhythms of life’s expansion, interruption, decline and renewal.
This, perhaps, is where my philosophy of being an agile architect of life begins to evolve. Agency does not disappear when life becomes unpredictable; rather, it evolves to adapt to change. We invoke agency to design the conditions we consider ideal, yet we also exercise agency to inhabit the conditions that are actually accessible to us in the present moment, in pursuit of the same goal: longevity and vitality.
Once I recognise this dual nature of self-agency, I am no longer interested only in optimising the individual components of my life. I am becoming more interested in how those components interact, how they shape the conditions in which I live, and how I can cultivate a way of inhabiting those conditions that allows my body, mind and creative self to continue flourishing — not only at my peak, but also through the inevitable moments when I am not.
My recent health and wellbeing audit
Intellectual Curiosity: An Underrated Health Strategy
One part of this ongoing process has been a rather comprehensive audit of my own relationship with health and wellbeing, shaped by my growing awareness of longevity and my evolving relationship with diet, exercise and self-care.
Am I blindly buying into the current biohacking hype, or chasing relentlessly after wellbeing products that promise intelligent solutions and feature cutting-edge technology? I would say that I am certainly curious about them, but in a relatively practical rather than obsessive way. My curiosity is not really about collecting more products or accumulating more protocols; it is essentially about understanding the underlyig principles, patterns and biological mechanisms that sit beneath them.
Over the past several months, one seemingly mundane practice began to reveal just how much my thinking around food had changed:
I started reading food labels.
Guilty as charged: throughout my long relationship with food, I had never really intended to decode ingredient lists on food packaging. This does not mean that I had never eaten healthily; rather, I had previously been satisfied with a much more superficial understanding of what constituted a healthy diet. I could tick the conventional boxes — vegetables, fruit, protein, generally wholesome food — without necessarily being intellectually curious about the nutritional composition of what I was eating, or about what particular nutrients were actually doing inside my body.
My pursuit of longevity gradually pushed me beyond that surface level.
I began applying my intellectual curiosity — which I regard as an underrated health strategy — to what actually constitutes the nutritional architecture of a diet at a granular level, and to the broader relationship between food and health from a more holistic perspective: the constellation of nutrients, the underlying biological mechanisms, and the ways in which seemingly small nutritional choices participate in a much larger network of physiological processes. That curiosity pulled me back towards medicine and science as subjects of inquiry, and I found myself researching areas such as the microbiome, metabolism and mitochondrial function.
I was no longer content simply to fulfil a daily KPI of consuming vegetables, fruit and protein. I had become compelled to decipher unfamiliar medical concepts, investigate the systems behind them, and identify the missing pieces in a nutritional equation that eluded me.
Omega-3 is a simple example. I have been taking fish-oil supplements for years, but I had never really grasped — nor had I particularly intended to unpack — why DHA, a key nutrient in omega-3, mattered. Once I began associating DHA with cognitive functions such as attention and memory, areas I am now consciously trying to sharpen and deepen, my previous resistance or oblivion towards certain foods began to weaken. I became more willing to incorporate salmon and other sources of these nutrients into my diet, not simply because somebody told me I should, but because I had developed sufficient understanding to make the choice meaningful to me.
That distinction matters.
Knowledge can certainly be empowering, but acquiring knowledge also requires a brain that is willing to tolerate complexity and stretch intellectual bandwidth. In my own laboratory, that means deliberately consuming dense and sometimes esoteric information in the areas of health, nutrition and wellbeing, even when it takes substantial time and cognitive effort to work through the underlying systems and fundamental mechanisms through which the body actually functions.
I am not suggesting that being self-taught has transformed me into a dietitian or health expert — nor was that ever my intention. What fascinates me is the extent to which knowledge and education can reshape behaviour at a visceral level.
When I immerse myself in the world of wholesome,nutrient-oriented food for long and deeply enough, my relationship with food itself begins to evolve. It first manifests in my palate, almost physiologically: foods that once seemed appealing can gradually lose their allure, while simpler and more nourishing foods become increasingly attractive. I also find myself better equipped to resist temptation, not because I have attained extraordinary willpower, but because my perception has changed. Just one glimpse of a label, with its display of ingredients and nutritional information, can shift my mind about a “treat” I was about to choose, making it harder for me to make that dietary choice nonchalantly.
If I eat something that I know works to the detriment of my health, I can almost viscerally feel that I am putting poison into my body — an extreme way of framing it, perhaps, but a broad guiding principle behind my food choices now: why would I want to poison myself?
In that sense, I am not simply changing what I eat. I am changing my relationship with food. And perhaps that is what actually moves the needle.
There is, however, an important caveat. I am not positioning myself as someone who gives nutritional or dietary advice; that belongs to the expertise of qualified professionals. My intention is much more personal: to advocate for my own ability to optimise my health, using an approach that I can continually refine according to my own constitution, circumstances and the evidence I encounter.
And that brings me back to knowledge.
For me, intellectuality has become part of health practice itself. I think of it as a form of intellectual training for informed decision-making. We often hear that we should take agency over our health, but I have begun to question what that agency actually means if we simply buy into whatever happens to be trending, follow a heuristic because an authority recommends it, or consume health hype through random algorithmic feeds.
For a long time, I was that person. I would take a mental shortcut, accept an unfamiliar concept at face value, or simply follow what an expert had said without necessarily having the curiosity or cognitive endurance to unpack or dissect what sat beneath it.
I am still waging an ongoing battle against heuristic thinking and the paradigms I have unconsciously inherited. but I find myself less willing to surrender to ambiguity or remain at the point of entry. I feel more compelled to find out what mechanism might explain it, what evidence supports it, and whether it actually makes sense within the larger architecture of my life.
After listening to Mel Robbins podcast with Dr. Rhonda Patrick PhD, for example, I incorporated her smoothie idea into my morning routine, experimenting with combinations of kale or spinach, blueberries, avocado and beta-glucan — a prebiotic, rather than a probiotic. This was another small example of how my curiosity had begun to operate almost habitually: I found myself looking up the distinction between prebiotics and probiotics, instead of being content with the vague idea of “good bacteria”. The goal, ultimately, is not to know everything, but to make better and more informed decisions.
Intellectual curiosity also applies to our cultural diet. In an era engulfed by cheap dopamine hits, fragmented attention and algorithmic feeds, knowledge can only become genuinely empowering when accompanied by discernment — including discernment about the cultural diet and content we choose to consume. I have made a personal proclamation that longevity matters to me, so I hold myself accountable for continuing to learn about human biology, physiology and neuroscience — to better understand the body I strive to preserve and the intricate systems that sustain it.
That learning can feel daunting and intimidating at its inception. Yet gradually, I have found myself building my intellectual endurance: defaulting to long-form, complex and demanding content rather than remaining at the mercy of light, fluffy stimuli. In that sense, the pursuit of longevity has unexpectedly become another form of cognitive training.
But knowledge is only empowering when it can eventually be translated into lived experience and embodied action. That being said, discretion also applies to how I translate that knowledge into practice. That restraint matters too. I do not overhaul my entire diet because of one podcast episode. I do not immediately integrate every noval concept I encounter into my wellbeing regime. I am gradually building a relationship with each element — learning enough to understand it, observing how it fits into my own life, and allowing its relevance to emerge over time.
In that sense, what I am really building is not a perfect health protocol, but intellectual curiosity and a relationship with my own wellbeing.
Strength Training as a Practice of Resilience
Extending this intellectual curiosity into another essential dimension of my wellbeing — exercise — it has transcended mere fitness goals to form the core of my identity.
Here is a quick snapshot of my current exercise composition: two days of aerobic exercise, two days of BodyPump, one day of BodyBalance, and one day of infrared sauna for recovery and detox . BodyPump has now become central to my exercise formula, but my relationship with strength training was anything but linear.
After listening to countless podcast conversations revolving around ageing and longevity, I gradually cemented a belief that muscle — or, more precisely in the context of my own quest, strength — plays an essential role in shaping future health. Three years ago, I could walk past a BodyPump class with a dismissive inner monologue: there is no way I am ever touching that bar, lol. Two years ago, I began sporadically lifting weights — very light ones, lol. A year ago, BodyPump once a week had been added to my workout routine as a non-negotiable. This year, I have doubled down on strength training twice a week — still light, lol, but considerably better than where I began.
An episode of The Diary of a CEO featuring mitochondrial scientist Dr Martin Picard deepened my pursuit of strength training further. I was particularly struck by his perspective that we are not simply our bodies, but also energy flowing through them, and by his explanation of the role mitochondria play within our cells in producing ATP, the energy currency that fuels the body. I was hooked by the question: how can I support and expand my mitochondrial capacity? Strength training became a key part of that equation.
My fitness goal is evolving as my awareness deepens. I am no longer simply pursuing a thinner body, but a leaner and denser body composition through strength training. Every time I lift that weight, it is still physically demanding, and mentally exhausting. I cannot pretend that it has suddenly become effortless, or that every session is enjoyable.
Yet every time I push through that excruciating moment of physical resistance, I feel that I have outgrown my previous physical bandwidth, moving closer to the question that initially hooked me: how can I support and expand my mitochondrial capacity?
It has become a form of dual training — elevating both my physical strength and my mental fortitude. When life has hit me hard or thrown punches at me, I have been reminded of those almost invincible moments in which I could endure both physical and mental challenges — to bounce back, to withstand resistance, and even to conquer what initially seemed insurmountable. And I did.
Hence, strength training not only builds my physical endurance, but also strengthens my mental resilience — a combination I consider one of the most elemental yet fundamental conditions through which I can flourish and thrive.
Skin and Hair Care: Another Experiment in Listening to the Body
The final aspect of this comprehensive audit brings me to my skin and hair care — another crucial area of my self-care and wellbeing practice.
I equate skin and hair care with self-care. I am not a heavy make-up person, but I am an enthusiastic skincare person. That being said, my skincare philosophy is rooted in “less is more”, built on an organic and holistic approach.
I deeply resonate with the philosophy that we should shift our focus from approaching skincare merely through topical products to also addressing its underlying sources. Skin health is inextricably tied to our gut health, food, sleep, stress management and general wellbeing. To me, skincare requires both a broad perspective and personalised attentiveness.
Within the architecture of the body, the skin forms its living façade — visible from the outside, yet inseparable from the conditions beneath it. Beauty devices, topical applications and active ingredients are therefore not the architecture itself, but simply elements within it — individual pieces of a much larger puzzle.
One addition to my skincare routine has been a LED red-light face mask, which I have been using for around two years. When I first incorporated it into my routine, I did not set high expectations. My skin was generally in good condition, but I was drawn to its perceived anti-ageing potential, largely influenced by endorsements from medical practitioners whom I respect and trust.
Ageing is a multilayered process shaped by genetics and epigenetics. I am certainly well aware that no single device can override the complexity of biological ageing. What I can do, however, is support my skin through consistent routines, cumulative care and a holistic lens. In that sense, I have always approached the mask as one small component within a broader ecosystem. I would not call it a game changer, but rather one piece of the puzzle. That mindset has helped me remain consistent, using it regularly without expecting dramatic transformation. Over time, I did notice some subtle yet mighty calming and stabilising effects on my skin, particularly in softening breakouts and reducing inflammation.
The foundation matters, but so does the tailoring. Just as architecture establishes a structural framework before it is adapted to the people who inhabit it, skincare also demands personalised attentiveness. My experience with retinal, however, taught me why that tailoring — and, in a sense, surrendering to my own limits — matters.
I came to understand that many creams and serums primarily work at the surface level, improving hydration, plumpness or the overall appearance of the skin, while only certain active ingredients are designed to act more deeply and offer more substantive potency on skin ageing. Retinal fell into this category, pulling me into its potential.
After researching it, I embarked on my retinal journey twice this year. I strictly followed the instructions, beginning with a low concentration, which initially went well. I was then strongly encouraged to proceed to the next level, which immediately damaged my skin barrier. A week later, after my skin had recovered, I switched to another brand, partly out of frustration and resistance to my skin's limitations. As a result, my skin became irritated again.
Coming out of these trials and errors, I gained a new awareness of skin-care: that even an evidence-based intervention needs to be calibrated to the individual, and that knowing when to stop is itself a form of agency.
I have been open to exploring advanced skincare at my age now lol— whether through A LED Mask or science-backed exosome serums — within my budget, but I no longer believe skincare can be optimised simply through expensive bottles.
I am also increasingly attentive to what is actually suited to my individual skin constitution and whether I can integrate it into a sustainable routine. The paradox is that the more I learn, the more I recognise that there is no universally optimal formula; what works for others does not necessarily work for me.
The important lesson here is not to chase an ideal skin state, but to develop the discernment to honour how our bodies function as systems and what our own bodies are signalling to us. In doing so, each individual is given an equal opportunity to carve out their own unique trajectory of wellbeing.
Last but not least, my hair care offers one more valuable lesson about inhabitation beyond optimisation: alignment does not always reveal itself at the point of entry. Sometimes it takes time to calibrate ourselves to a new tool, practice or environment before we reach that sense of congruity.
I was on the fence about splurging on a Dyson hair dryer for a while. My previous one, the GHD, was still working perfectly well, yet my attention to scalp care had been growing, and Dyson's newer model offered a scalp-protection mode that addressed one of my core needs. Yet, Aesthetically speaking, I was essentially pursuing the salon blow-out effect and the bouncy volume I wanted in my hair, which seem to eludes in Dyson’s direct offer.
I had considered an upgraded GHD dryer, which promised a salon-style blow-out, yet I was also drawn to the intelligence embedded in a hair dryer and the optimal results it promised. The decision itself became another exercise in informed decision-making: understanding what I was actually looking for and why a particular tool might fit my actual needs.
I finally pulled the trigger and made the purchase. Interestingly, it took several uses before I felt fully aligned with my new Dyson dryer. I had to experiment with how to shape the volume I wanted, learn how to attach the styling tools, watch tutorial videos to unlock its hidden features and functions, and gradually discover what worked best for me.
The verdict? The Dyson hair dryer has absolutely stood out as one of the best investments I have made this year, and it is now a must-carry item whenever I travel, lol.
My adjustment period with the Dyson dryer prompted me to reach another reckoning. Not only does making informed decisions require intellectual curiosity, but testing compatibility also demands inhabitation. We choose, experiment, adapt and gradually discover how something can work within the architecture of our own lives.
Whether it is an object, a tool, an environment or ultimately another human being, it takes time to build a relationship and discover how two entities coexist and flourish in harmony.
In retrospect , this has been deeply personal audit of my relationship with health and wellbeing. What connects these seemingly disparate strands — diet, exercise, skincare and hair care — is their place within the larger architecture through which I pursue my vision of longevity and vitality. Within this architecture, I exercise self-agency by consciously designing and creating the conditions that I believe can support that vision, and by optimising the variables that are within my reach.
Yet somewhere along this journey, I encountered a more poignant realisation:
while I can optimise the conditions, I cannot optimise the outcome.
I can make informed choices, refine my routines, strengthen my body, nourish my skin and learn to work with the tools and environments around me. But none of these can guarantee the state I ultimately seek. Biology remains variable. Circumstances remain unpredictable. And the body, despite everything I do to support it, retains a degree of autonomy beyond my design.
This is perhaps where my understanding of self-agency begins to shift. Optimisation remains valuable, but it is not the ultimate antidote to everything that stands between me and longevity and vitality. It can shape the conditions in which I live, but it cannot fully determine what emerges from them. And perhaps this is the point at which optimisation reaches its limit.
When Optimisation Reaches Its Limit
For a long time, I approached health and wellbeing through the lens of optimisation.
This was not about jumping on the bandwagon of every biohacking trend or trying to control every variable of my life. Rather, it was an attempt to claim full agency over my life. I believed that if I created the right conditions around my body and mind — exercised consistently, ate well, maintained my routines, protected my sleep, paid attention to my environment, pursued perpetual learning, and remained highly disciplined — I could build a system that would support longevity, vitality, intellectual depth and creativity over the long term.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach. I still believe in the value of all of this. What has changed is my understanding of what optimisation can actually achieve.
When health had, hands down, been one of the areas in which I felt my optimisation had yielded the greatest results, being under the weather recently wore me down and hit me particularly hard. In a sense, when optimisation failed in the area in which I held the most confidence — my health — I was confronted with the question: why have I done everything right on paper, yet something can still go wrong?
It was not one dramatic illness. It was more a series of ailments in succession — a mild headache here, a sore throat over there, disrupted sleep, eventually culminating in a cold that lingered for over a month. None of these episodes, individually, was particularly serious. But together, they were enough to interrupt the rhythm I had built around my life.
It first disrupted my workout routine. Sounds like a broken record, but exercise has already become such an important part of my identity. When I suddenly could not exercise in the way I normally did, I felt as though I had temporarily lost access to a part of myself.
There was also a psychological dimension to it. As an adult who takes full ownership of my life, health management remains a priority within my life architecture. Being sick triggered unnecessary emotional misery that I almost forbade myself from slipping into. My mantra is: I command my health, I command my life. Lol.
If that were not enough, my upcoming trip to Japan further amplified my stress, activating my anxiety to the point that it almost overrode my excitement about the trip. I am rarely sick, let alone preparing for a solo trip while just recovering from one. I began catastrophising: What if I become unwell again while travelling alone? What if my body does not cooperate?
Above all, the most catastrophic impact of this series of episodes was on my creativity and vitality. During those periods, my writing felt stagnant. My attention became fragmented, scattered in every direction. My cognition hit its lowest bandwidth.
And that led me to a deeper question:
How do I inhabit a seemingly broken system?
In my case, how do I inhabit my body when its perfect health record has been tarnished, and how can I restore my confidence in it?
Sounds cliché, but perhaps this does take compassion and empathy — qualities that can often elude individuals who uphold the principles of optimisation. I was bitter and resentful when my body did not live up to my expectations. I was interrogating my body harshly.
Why are you tired? Why can't you train today? Why aren't you recovering faster? Why are you disrupting the rhythm I have worked so hard to establish?
And then I realised how unilateral and arbitrary that relationship was.
My body is not an employee who has failed to meet a performance target. It is not a machine that should operate according to a timetable simply because I have designed one. Instead of beating myself up when my body sporadically malfunctioned, I needed to ask how I could accommodate the body I actually had at that moment.
That meant that on days when I could not make it to the gym, I could walk through neighbourhood gardens instead. It meant allowing movement to become gentler for a while rather than interpreting reduced intensity as failure. Later, when I travelled to Japan, it meant staying vigilant — wearing a mask, ensuring adequate nutrition and taking sensible precautions — without allowing the fear of getting sick to dominate the experience. It meant using the hotel treadmill during my trip and adapting my movement practice to the conditions available to me.
And eventually, when I returned to Sydney and resumed my full exercise routine, the experience felt different. Going back to the gym no longer felt like fulfilling an obligation to preserve my identity. It felt like a privilege. The ability to exercise, to lift weights, to walk, to move through space with strength and coordination — these are not things I am entitled to indefinitely. They are capacities that I am fortunate to access at a particular moment in time.
From controlling the body to inhabiting the body
Once I made this mental leap, my relationship with my body shifted.
If I think of my body primarily as a system to optimise, every deviation can feel like a problem. Fatigue becomes inefficiency. Illness becomes failure. A missed workout becomes a disruption of discipline. A period of reduced cognitive capacity becomes a threat to productivity.
Instead, I began to think of my body as another me — someone I should treat with empathy and compassion. I do not simply manage my body through optimisation any more; I live through it by inhabiting it. It is the medium through which I experience the world, think, move, create, connect and perceive.
This does not mean becoming passive or abandoning responsibility. I still practise what I preach in health and wellbeing. The difference is that these practices are becoming means rather than ends.
Creating conditions is not the same as guaranteeing outcomes.
I can create habits and discipline that support good health, but I cannot guarantee that I will never become sick.
I can create infrastructure and systems that support creativity, but I cannot guarantee that I can enter my creative zone fluidly every day.
I can create an environment that supports concentration, but I cannot guarantee that my mind will always be focused.
This is perhaps where self-agency becomes more mature and agile. Self-agency is not total control. It is the ability to take responsibility for the conditions that are within my influence while accepting that there are conditions that are not. And when those conditions inevitably fluctuate, self-agency also means knowing how to respond — to rest, recalibrate and restart rather than interpreting every deviation as failure.
What truly matters about anthropomorphising my body, then, is knowing that I have accumulated enough self-awareness and embodied resilience over the past seven years to trust that process. I know that I can always reset, recalibrate and restart. By seeing my body as another me, I then find my way back and rebuild my confidence in my body and health.
The body, mind and creativity are not separate systems
The disruption also reminded me that longevity and vitality are much more interconnected than I already acknowledged.
When my body was not functioning at its usual level, neither was my mind.
Reading, writing, podcasting, piano practice and long-form conversations are not simply hobbies for me. They are ways of training attention, articulation, perception and thought. They are part of my vision to cultivate a life of intellectual depth and vitality.
My life-design system cannot simply optimise “health” in one category and “creativity” in another. They are inseparable systems, interwoven within the life architecture I am inhabiting.
Perhaps this is where my inquiry into longevity naturally expands into vitality. The more I think about sustaining life, the more I am compelled to ask what makes that life worth extending. For me, the answer lies in creating the conditions in which I can transcend merely being alive and move towards flourishing. What allows me to experience vitality is shaped not only by how I care for my body and mind, but also by how I inhabit the world itself — the spaces I enter, the beauty I encounter, the stories I tell, the people I listen to, and the ways I make meaning from what I experience.
Cultivating an Architectural Way of Seeing, Perceiving and Inhabiting the World
In 2026, I reached tectonic clarity about my identity as a writer by answering three questions: Who am I? Why am I doing what I do? Where does it lead?
Who am I?
I am not an archetypal hotel reviewer, lol. I am a design thinker who practises architectural writing. My writing emerges from a dialogue between architecture, interior design and narrative. Shaped through rigorous research across architecture, art, culture and history, each piece seeks to move beyond technical understanding — to capture the atmosphere, emotion and resonance embedded within a place.
Why am I doing what I do?
I am drawn to this type of writing because it sits at the intersection of my innate affinity for architecture, interior design and storytelling.
Where does it lead?
If I one day master architectural and design writing, I believe it will train my very particular kind of mind across four dimensions: the ability to see systems rather than merely objects; the ability to translate invisible experiences into language; the ability to cultivate taste into judgement; and the intellectual discipline to analyse, synthesise and interpret the built world.
I do not want to remain merely a passive consumer of the world. I want to read into its layers, systems and nature — and eventually participate more proactively in creating within it. I aspire to interpret the world through both intellectual and aesthetic lenses, to articulate the beauty, meaning and human experience embedded within the spaces and environment we inhabit. It also feels like my ultimate way of reconciling with the world, with my milieu and with humanity.
I am venturing onto the alchemical journey towards mastery of architectural and design writing with unwavering resolve. I believe I possess what this journey takes: the rigour of academia; the sensitivity of an artist; and the storytelling ability of a writer.
Perhaps the most substantial illustration of my architectural inhabitation is the journey itself.
It has taken me five years to move from making home-tour videos to developing my ongoing series, The Art of Staying: Spatial Essays on Hotels, Architecture and Atmosphere. What began as an interest in home interiors gradually became a practice of reading,writing and inhabiting them.
Hotels form the foundation of this writing series, offering intimate encounters with architecture, interiors, hospitality and the stories embedded within place. My each spatial piece begins with the immediacy of experience and unfolds through the reading of materiality, design intention, cultural context and historical lineage. My body of work seeks to understand how spaces are constructed, perceived and carried forward through memory.
But somewhere along this journey, I realised that I was cultivating something larger than a writing practice. I travel far to encounter architecture rather than merely study it from a distance. I rebuild my architectural language and technical register in order to perceive its legibility. I delve into its provenance and genesis through research into history and culture. Ultimately, I return to do the groundwork: I turn spatial reading and writing into an everyday practice, training myself to notice and articulate thresholds, materials, proportions, light and landscape, even when I am simply walking through my own neighbourhood.
I was cultivating an architectural way of seeing, perceiving and inhabiting the world — and this way of inhabiting connects me to vitality.
Beauty as a source of vitality
Beauty, to me, exists in two dimensions: as subjective perception and as existential inhabitation. By engaging my senses through travel, environments and daily rituals, I nurture vitality, joy and hope. The awe sparked by beauty can exist in a luxury hotel, where I tap into a designer's grand vision and aesthetic language, just as deeply as it can exist in a seemingly ordinary building I pass every day on my way to the gym, where I began to read an architect's ethos through its structure, materiality and relationship to its surroundings.
I refine my eye to cultivate connoisseurship, and sharpen my pen to articulate beauty. I gradually metabolise architectural language and industry terminology, setting myself up for the continual process of writing each piece. Yet the most profound transformation happens beyond the technical. I am shaping myself into someone with greater sensibility, becoming increasingly receptive to space, environment and experience.
And now I hold an absolute conviction that this is my most sustainable and nourishing way of living. Without beauty embedded in my life, I would be merely a body and mind that is alive, rather than one that is nourished. In fact, I would not be so fiercely motivated to pursue longevity if all I were seeking were simply to keep my body alive. I do not simply want to live longer so that I can accumulate more chronological time. I want more time to explore, experience, perceive, create and encounter the world.
Of course, not everyone needs to inhabit life through an architectural lens, lol. I am often inspired and uplifted by other people's ways of cultivating vitality, which translate into an upward and onward energy within me. At an early stage, I already realised that many forms of motivation are valid — as long as they remain moral, ethical and legal. I wholeheartedly hope that each individual can connect with what fuels their vitality and ignites their desire to rise each morning. I believe it is this collective yet distinctive dynamic that infuses the world with hope and joy.
It took me a long time to connect with that inner light within me. For years, it either felt too abstract for me to substantiate, or I simply couldn't reach clarity about what I truly wanted. Yet now I understand what sustains my desire, anchors my pursuit and gives me a profound gratitude for being alive. For me, vitality emerges through expansion and deepening of experience — through beauty, intellectual curiosity, architecture, writing, movement, human connection and storytelling.
These are the conditions that give me a sense of aliveness and make me feel nourished, not merely alive, and therefore the conditions I choose to create and inhabit. As a result, I genuinely feel grateful to live in this world. I keenly want to see what the future holds for me.
From consuming the world to inhabiting it
I was once deeply self-questioning about the extent to which I was simply consuming the world, rather than genuinely inhabiting it.
Had I earned enough authority to claim my architectural voice as an outsider?
Was I actually adding any value to others or to the world through my personal manifesto of pursuing longevity, vitality and a life as architecture?
Yet when I moved beyond those doubts, what remained was much simpler. At my core, I am an inherently joyful person who has faith in humanity. I therefore consciously surround myself with benevolent and congenial energy, while knowing that the opposite end of the spectrum exists. I genuinely gravitate towards sustaining a wholesome lifestyle, relentlessly driven to expand the depth and dimension of my experience. Ultimately, I aspire to stay vibrant and flourishing for as long as I can.
I once described my philosophy as designing a life through the lens of beauty within constraint. Now I feel that it has evolved into something deeper: inhabiting a life through the lens of architecture. I am not shrinking my horizon. I am trying to deepen my experience within the very limited time I have on earth.
Under the shared pursuit of beauty, meaning and vitality, each individual ultimately carves out their own unique and flourishing journey. It took me more than thirty years to formulate my own life architecture. I no longer want to dabble in everything and synthesise everything. I want to go deeper.
Because we are not immortal. Time is not infinite.
That being said, life does not suddenly become easier simply because I have connected with what feels like my inner calling. Whether it is writing architecture or running a podcast, all these elements nourish me while simultaneously challenging me, setting me up for a journey filled with fear, uncertainty and sometimes insurmountable tasks.
Practising architectural writing, for instance, can be both daunting and formidable. Much of it is built upon repetitive, almost tedious daily practice — reading, observing, researching, writing, refining. Yet, every so often, a light may suddenly hit me. I may find myself able to employ architectural language to articulate, with precision and aesthetic sensitivity, a building or space I may have walked past for years without truly seeing. That moment can bring a sudden, almost radiant thrill: the realisation that something I had once only sensed intuitively can now be perceived, understood and articulated through language.
But it takes an enormous accumulation of mundane moments to arrive at that fleeting sense of illumination. And once the thrill passes, I return to the daily practice again — to another building, another observation, another round of reading and writing.
Perhaps this is what following an inner calling requires: not an easier life, but a willingness to keep translating an inner vision into embodied action. The path I have chosen remains aspirational and lofty, even seemingly out of reach, but the seeds have already been planted. My only option is to keep moving towards that vision — however formidable the distance between where I am and where I aspire to be — and to trust that each mundane act of practice is quietly compounding , and eventually carrying me there.
I did not arrive at this absolute conviction overnight. I have been through a phase in which I confronted the profound sense of grief that I was just an ordinary person without exceptional talent or uncanny skill. Yet oddly, that moment also liberated me. It freed me from emotional pitfalls and self-handicapping. My world became expansive to the point that I no longer felt so governed by ego or ruled by emotion. I became less concerned with proving myself. I could simply be myself, execute my ideas and act on my vision — diligently and authentically.
Podcasting as another form of inhabitation
And perhaps this is where I need to return to the beginning of this piece. I strive for longevity and vitality through cultivating an architectural way of seeing, perceiving and inhabiting the world. Writing is one expression of that pursuit, but it is not the entirety of it.
Podcasting has commanded a place in my vitality matrix for years — even before my architectural writing took shape. I have been running Life Designer, a podcast featuring in-depth conversations with incredible talents from around the globe — artists, creatives, entrepreneurs, professionals and everything in between. At its heart, it is the storytelling that how they became their own life designers.
In 2025, I also began exploring a new form of podcasting — one that unfolds within architecturally magnificent spaces, where storytelling is shaped not only by conversation, but also by environment, atmosphere and place. A podcast with my dear friend recorded at the Gajoen Hotel in Tokyo marked the inauguration of this approach. The architecture, design and inner grandeur of the space became part of the story itself. The environment was no longer merely a backdrop to the conversation; it became part of the narrative.
And from that experience, my vision for the future of podcasting began to emerge. Perhaps this is another form of architectural inhabitation. I am not simply documenting a place. I am allowing the place to participate in the story. I am not simply interviewing a person. I am entering their world, listening to how they have constructed their own life architecture, and allowing their experience to expand my own and that of anyone who encounters the conversation.
Writing equips me to observe closely, research rigorously and articulate eloquently. Podcasting, then, connects me to the core of my craft — human connection. Both are ways of engaging with the world. Both keep me intellectually and creatively flourishing. And perhaps both are part of the same deeper pursuit: to remain awake to the world for as long as I am here.
The life architecture I have spent years building
Looking back, I realise that I have spent around seven years internalising and formulating my own life architecture. Perhaps the rest of it has been scaffolding work: learning, experimenting, moving, creating, failing and recalibrating. Now I feel that I have finally reached the point where the architecture itself has become visible to me — one that sits at the intersection of longevity and vitality. Within my life architecture, I create and inhabit the conditions through which I feel most fully nourished .
If I were to touch on one last, but not least, inherent correlation between longevity and vitality, it would come from a very personal observation and subjective lens, lol. Almost all of my friends, or professionals and creatives I admire, remain front runners in the anti-ageing race, lol. Their biological age always seems to trump their chronological age — in the sense that their vitality, creativity and energy have translated into the most potent ingredients for enduring the passage of time. Hence, my anti-ageing ultra-formula emerges: stay creative, stay youthful, lol.
In 2026, my friend and I reunited in Tokyo again, and, as always, our epic reunion culminated in soulful and nourishing conversation. Something my friend said afterwards has continued to reverberate in my head: You are now standing on the cusp of a new chapter. The best is yet to come.
I really don't know what my future will be. Once, someone said to me, “I'm keen to see where you will eventually land.” I said back, “So am I.” Perhaps what unites all human trajectories is precisely this uncertainty: no one knows what the final answer will be until the final moment comes.
Until then, let's keep creating. Keep moving. Keep seeing. Keep inhabiting.
Because life is architecture.
