We Need Another Lifetime… Just Not After We Die
Another Lifetime...
Sometimes the week's real story does not come from a headline.
A small message from your childhood can lay an entire lifetime before you.
It came from Mine, a friend since childhood.
On the screen was the name of Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, a song called Nobahari, and a sentence that refused to leave me:
"We'll need another lifetime after we die…"
I read it.
Then I read it again.
Maybe that is why Mine sent it.
Those who know me, know…
Mine is one of them.
Not every sentence lands in the same place for everyone.
To me, "we'll need another lifetime" was not merely a beautiful line of poetry.
The rest is mine to keep…
I am not someone who reads the word death from a safe distance.
So I went looking for the original couplet.
In the Persian original, the word was not "death." It was "separation." In the song, separation had become death.
Only one word had changed.
But with it, the entire weight of the meaning.
Separation still carries the possibility of return.
Death does not.
And yet, it was not death that stopped me.
It was the thought that followed:
That we might have spent this whole life doing nothing but hoping…
How much of life we postpone until the day we will finally live it.
When I get better…
When things ease up…
When the time is right…
When everything falls into place…
Then, one day, we realize the life we were waiting for has passed while we were waiting.
Maybe we need another lifetime not because the first was too short.
Maybe we need it because we never had the courage to truly live the first.
And if we were given a second lifetime?
Would we live this one?
Or would we spend it hoping for a third?
Six Years of Silence
Şebnem Ferah will step onto a stage in Istanbul tonight.
After six years.
Her Festival Park Yenikapı concert is sold out.
Six years…
In today's world, disappear for six days and you fear people will forget you. Go six weeks without posting and you panic: "The algorithm will erase me." Stay silent for six months and people call you finished.
She was silent for six years.
Then she announced a single date, and every ticket was gone.
So not every silence means being forgotten.
Perhaps you can be remembered without constantly reminding people that you exist.
Perhaps what matters is not how often we appear, but whether we have anything to say when we do.
Some people can be silent for six years and lose none of their voice.
Others speak every day and leave no sentence behind.
Teaching Machines to Write by Killing Books
One of the strangest stories I read this week was about what artificial intelligence companies have been doing with books.
Anthropic bought millions of printed books to train its AI model. Their spines were cut away, the pages scanned, the text fed into the machine; the physical remains were then discarded.
That was the method described in court records.
We tore apart millions of books to teach a machine to write well.
Could there be a more perfect portrait of our age?
We want the knowledge inside the book.
We have no patience for the book itself.
We take the sentence and throw away the page. Extract the memory; erase the trace.
And we call it "learning."
Perhaps machines will soon write like us.
That is not the frightening part.
The frightening part is that we have already begun to read like machines:
Scan fast. Extract what is useful. Forget the rest.
We are outraged at a machine that learns to write by slicing the spine off a book.
But how many people's stories have we heard only as far as the sentence that was useful to us?
A Reservation at Grandma's Table
The restaurant world's latest obsession is "grandmacore".
Places designed to feel like Grandma's kitchen…
Mismatched plates, old tablecloths, food cooked slowly, the warmth of home—and a little of another time.
Everything we once modernized our way out of, we are now booking a table to get back into.
We threw away the old plates.
We made the tables smaller.
We decided that time spent around a table was inefficient.
Now we are trying to buy back, as restaurant décor, the feeling we edited out of our lives.
What we miss is not really Grandma's cooking.
It is being expected somewhere.
Sitting down at a table and having someone look at our face, not our phone.
A voice saying, "Have some more."
The comfort of knowing that no bill will arrive.
Here is the strange part:
First we removed intimacy from our lives. Then we gave it an English name and put it on the menu.
Now we are paying not for the memory, but for its décor.
Twenty Years on the Same Pitch
Tomorrow, Spain and Argentina will meet in the World Cup final.
On one side, Lionel Messi, 39.
On the other, Lamine Yamal, 19.
A photograph taken years ago is circulating once again.
Messi was 20 when, during a charity photo shoot, he bathed a baby Yamal, then only a few months old.
The young man in that photograph may play his final World Cup match tomorrow.
The baby in his arms will walk onto the same pitch as the other side's greatest hope.
Sometimes time needs no narrator.
It takes its own photograph.
The match that could be one man's ending is being called the other's beginning.
Yet for both, perhaps, it is simply the same ninety minutes.
We like to divide life into beginnings and finals. But when the whistle blows, no one on the pitch knows which chapter of his own story he is in.
Messi will reach for the same trophy as the child he once held.
Tomorrow, twenty years will fit onto a single pitch.
And once again, we will understand:
We do not notice time as it passes.
We recognize it only when it stands in front of us.
This week, a friend sent me a sentence.
An artist returned to the stage after six years of silence.
Books were torn apart so that machines could learn to write.
The tables we lost were served back to us as a trend.
A child once held in someone's arms will line up tomorrow as a rival for the same trophy.
They all say the same thing:
Time is not passing.
We are.
All while telling ourselves that we have not begun to live yet…
Editorial Note:
This essay was prepared on the basis of publicly available sources, official data, statements by institutions and individuals, and the author's personal observations and assessments, all accessible as of July 18, 2026. Events and activities not personally attended or observed by the author are presented only to the extent reported by the cited sources and in the third person. Factual information is supported by the relevant links; all commentary, analysis, and inferences are the author's own. Unless expressly stated otherwise, the author has no paid partnership, sponsorship, or commercial relationship with any person, institution, work, brand, or venue mentioned. Reports of factual errors will be reviewed and corrected where necessary.
Sources and Links
Saadi — Ghazal 559, original Persian text
https://ganjoor.net/saadi/divan/ghazals/sh559/
Mohsen Namjoo — Damavand (2005), official album page
https://www.mohsennamjoo.com/buy-official-albums/p/damavand-1995
Nobahari — Mohsen Namjoo, YouTube recording
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTzxqfTOStw
Solmaz Naraghi's rendition in Abbas Kiarostami's hospital room
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeG-4GNxd2s
Şebnem Ferah — July 18, 2026 concert listing, Biletix
https://www.biletix.com/etkinlik/5PSF3/TURKIYE/tr
Anthropic's book-scanning method — The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthropic-ai-scan-destroy-books/