My Search for Freedom in the Swedish Countryside
A technologist and activist on getting what he needed to finally feel free
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”―Henry David Thoreau, ‘Walden’
I took a big step last year. Having lived in cities all my life, I decided to buy a small house in the middle of the forest. It was exciting, it was invigorating, but most of all, it was liberating.
A lot of people find it kind of weird, and understandably so. Globetrotting city dwellers in their mid-twenties moving from the thriving city of Istanbul to the Swedish woods. Wouldn’t I miss the coffee shops, the restaurants, the tea parlors with the old men playing games, the minarets, the Bosporus, the architecture, the shops, the bars, the noise? The answer, as it turned out, is no.
I’m a writer. I’m an activist, an advocate, and speaker. At the end of summer 2016, after a failed coup attempt, a series of terrorist attacks across the country and the following government crackdown, we were hardly the most popular guys in town, at least with the authorities.
