In October 2025, I stopped writing The Brief. The pressure of running multiple businesses, managing multiple jurisdictions, and being a present father to ten children had accumulated to the point where something had to give, and the writing gave first.
I started again in November. Six months of articles, published here, covering everything from the German wealth tax debate to the Holy Family's flight into Egypt, from the Minoan civilisation at Knossos to the death of Khamenei and the Tallinn restaurant where I ate dinner with my brothers.
Writing is one of the oldest technologies for making sense of the world, and I had forgotten, during the months I was not doing it, how much I depend on it.
What Writing Does
It clarifies. The thought that seems clear in your head often turns out, when you try to put it in sentences, to be considerably less clear than you believed. The discipline of writing — of finding the right word, the right sequence, the right level of detail — is the discipline of thinking. You cannot write clearly about something you do not understand. The act of writing reveals the gaps.
It connects. The articles in The Brief that have generated the most response — the ones about my father, about Kilian, about Amy, about what St Sebastian means to me — are not the tax planning pieces. They are the personal ones. The ones where I let people see more than the professional surface. This surprised me. It should not have.
It creates something that lasts. I am fifty years old. I have ten children. At some point they will want to know who their father was — not the biography, not the LinkedIn profile, but the interior life. The things I actually thought about. The way I understood the world. These articles are that. Not a memoir — too scattered, too occasional. But a record. A voice that will outlast me.
What I Have Learned About Writing in Public
Writing in public is different from keeping a journal. The awareness of an audience — however imagined, however uncertain — changes what you write and how you write it. It introduces a restraint that is sometimes useful and sometimes a constraint.
The discipline I have tried to maintain is this: write what I actually think, not what I think the audience wants to hear. Say the uncomfortable thing, the counterintuitive thing, the thing that cost me something to articulate. The articles that pull back from the honest position to protect the author are always the weakest ones.
I have not always succeeded. But the attempt is the right attempt.
What Comes Next
I am going to keep writing. Not six months without a gap, which clearly does not work at the pace my life moves. But regularly, consistently, in the way that any serious practice requires.
The world is not running out of material. The Iran war is not resolved. The European fiscal crisis is not resolved. The question of what genuine freedom requires — financially, politically, spiritually — is not resolved.
And the personal material is inexhaustible. Ten children still growing. A marriage deepening. Brothers to have dinner with in cities I have not yet visited. A faith being tested and renewed in the ordinary and extraordinary rhythms of a life that is, despite everything, more than I deserve.
Thank you for reading. It means more than I know how to say.
Life is short and fleeting. One shot. Make it count.
Work with Sebastian
If anything in the past six months of The Brief has prompted a question about your own financial freedom, jurisdictional positioning, or planning, the conversation starts here. Book a consultation.