This is my story
1994. I was born into a contradiction. My mother's side were artists. Composers and painters. Among them Béla Bartók, my great-great-grandfather. My father's side were engineers and mechanics who fixed locomotives and heavy machinery. Grease, iron, the smell of hot metal.
The nineties. Romania was a few years out of communism, and nobody had thrown anything away. The adults around me had spent their whole lives being told what to want. When the Western brands arrived, that repressed desire turned into a consumerist frenzy. You were what you had.
Age 5. The Orthodox Church. Gold, candles, chant, incense that stays in your coat for days. People who had traveled a long way to stand for a minute in front of an icon. At the front there is an altar wall, with a door in it, and the important part happens behind. I remember always wanting to know what went on back there, and it took me years to understand that hiding it was the point.
Age 6. Cartoons, all day. Then sticker albums with Dragon Ball Z and the World Cup. The rare ones were rare because the company made it so, and that was enough to make them valuable. I cared more about finishing the album than about any player in it. Once it was full, I lost interest within a week.
Age 8. Harry Potter took over. I read all the books while refusing to open the school mandated ones. Waited for my Hogwarts letter. I truly believed it was coming. And that the wooden branch in my hand was a real wand.
Age 10. Two years after I got my first computer, I was creating trojan viruses and getting into my classmates' computers, in love with the internet and the hacker subculture. None of it was clever code. It worked because the file's name promised something people were hungry for. And to me, that was magical.
Age 12. First design work, in Photoshop, for a Lineage 2 artwork contest. I loved that game. I had three accounts, 7 characters on each, years of my life in there. The game had its own economy and social hierarchy. Then, I got into Team Fortress right when it started selling cosmetic hats, and I got one. It did nothing. It was worth something because everybody else was chasing it.
Age 13. Illusionism. Card tricks, misdirection, Criss Angel. People know it can't be real and go along with it anyway. They want it to be real for the length of the trick, and that wanting does most of the work.
Age 14. First paying design client, a blogger. Also the year I found The Real Hustle and watched every episode. Same skills as the magicians, but pointed at money. Right on time for adolescence. What stayed with me is the power of human greed and how con artists exploit it.
Age 18. After binging Mad Men in high school, I felt I found my path. Here was an entire industry doing what the magicians did, at scale, in public, and getting paid for it. It felt like real magic. So I left for Denmark to study entrepreneurship and design management, the perfect combo to start my own ad agency.
Age 20. At some point in college, I started reading my way through spirituality and esotericism. Christian mysticism, occultism, Buddhism, Taoism, Freemasonry. Looking for something to fill the existential void. Every one of them has a working theory for handling desire.
Age 21. Finished studies, came back home, and joined the most successful branding agency in Romania. They were pivoting towards user experience. Digital marketing, websites, big clients.
Age 23. I joined Renault Group and became its youngest manager, running business automation across four brands and 30 countries, with a team of eight. We were building software robots. My favorite part of the job was naming them and writing the way they spoke in emails. People wrote back to them politely.
Age 24, San Francisco. First time in Silicon Valley, visiting Stanford, Google and Apple. I walked past people who had slept in a tent to get the new iPhone. It looked like the pilgrim queue outside my church at home. Same patience, same certainty that what was behind the doors would be worth the suffering. I thought about it for a long time.
Age 25. Youngest member of the company's local executive committee. It was going well, but I started to miss creative work.
Age 26. Left for Endava and went back to design in user experience. Understanding desire and fulfilling it through a user interface. Tens of millions of people use the products I worked on, every month, and none of them know my name. That suited me fine.
Age 28. Moved into brand and creative direction. Teasers, storyboards, then generative AI, where I could finally get the visions out of my head by myself. Ended up running global brand creative for the company, across 28 countries.
Age 31. Started filming myself while talking brands, culture, and desire. Hit 2 million views in the first month. It was the same material I had been circling since I was a kid.
Underneath it. I'm an introvert and I spend most of my time in my inner world.
Desire is the thing I keep coming back to, in my work and in my spiritual practice. We treat it as the most private thing we own, proof of who we are. But in truth, it gets engineered. I own a fifty dollar watch that keeps better time than a Rolex. I still want the Rolex. Whatever I have to say about this, I am inside it too.
The oddity is that I come at it from both ends. During the day I study desire for a living, and I'm good at it. In the evening I sit in meditation and look for the one who is doing the wanting. I haven't reconciled the two, and I've stopped assuming I'm ever meant to.
If there is a red thread to my life, it's desire. How it gets built, who does the building, and what's left when it stops.