As the old story goes: I’m walking down the street carrying a cup of coffee. Someone bumps into me… and I spill it. Why did I spill the coffee? — “Because someone bumped into me!” Wrong answer. I spilled coffee because coffee was in my cup. If there had been tea in my cup, I would have spilled tea. The “bump” didn’t choose what spilled — it was in my cup already.

Life bumps into me every day: a careless comment, a plan that falls apart, a bad morning that wasn’t even my fault. And what comes out of me in that moment is whatever I’ve been carrying inside — patience or temper, kind words or sharp ones, a good mood and a smile — or no resources at all. The same is true for everyone around me: they are carrying their own cup, their own worries, their own reality. Their bump is rarely about me at all.

So the real question is: what’s in my cup? And what keeps filling it with the wrong things?

And what CAN I change?

The Russian doctor and thinker Ilya Shevelev named three blockers (which he called signs of immaturity): touchiness, hot temper, and stubbornness. Touchiness fills my cup with “everyone is against me,” so every bump feels like an attack. A hot temper fills it with fire, so the spill burns before I can think. Stubbornness seals my cup shut, so nothing new gets in and nothing changes. Another analogy by psychologist Jonathan Haidt to picture it: my feelings are the elephant, my reason is just the rider — and the elephant decides first.

That’s the easy version. Here’s the harder truth: there are always many elephants in the room, and sometimes it gets hard to have a conversation at all. It’s especially hard for me to keep a positive attitude when I am at my most vulnerable, at my “low” points. When the conversation touches things that should be handled with great responsibility by humanity — like abuse of power, through politics, or money, with greed and war, or abuse of women, of people with mental health issues — I know the struggle for basic human rights is a sad reality for many. I’ve noticed a few new triggers of mine lately— the victim mentality in grown ups, responsible AI and sadly, the job market (what a surprise). I don’t find solace in any religion either — the good intent of love and forgiveness is too often not backed by actions, and the divide between the words and the deeds is too wide.

There is an ingredient out there that I found is worth putting in my cup on purpose: humor. A laugh at myself is a pause button. I once knocked over my own glass during a job interview. I laughed — “well, that went beautifully” — and the joke helped me keep going, writing on the whiteboard, and I got the job. But humor has a twin that looks like it and isn’t: sarcasm. The difference is simple — humor laughs with people, sarcasm laughs at them. Sarcasm is contempt wearing a joke’s clothes, and contempt is the most destructive of Gottman’s Four Horsemen. The test is easy: would the other person laugh too? If the answer is no, it’s not a joke. It’s a weapon.

On occasion, when my cup spills into a conversation, it may look like those Four Horsemen: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. The good news is that each one has a small antidote — and small is the point. I don’t need a new personality. I don’t need you to have a new personality. Likely, we all may need a few small steps at times, and here’s where it gets practical for me.

I cannot change the bumps, but I work every day on what’s in my cup.

• I pause. Let my cup settle before I answer.
• I laugh — at myself first. A little humor lightens the spill.
• I ask. “What did you mean by that?” beats assuming the worst.
• I aim to own a little. Even a small piece of responsibility opens the door again.
• I take a break. Step away, calm down, come back. Or not ;)
• I wonder. “What would change my mind here?” If the answer is nothing, I’m not thinking — I’m defending.

And then there’s the quiet part nobody sees: refilling my cup on purpose. What I read, who I listen to, how I talk to myself when no one is watching — that is what goes in. And that is what, with some luck, will spill out next time life bumps into me.

Life will bump into me. It always does. I can’t stop the bumps. But I can choose what’s in my cup.

I didn’t understand how much of my identity was built on other people’s expectations until I left the place where those expectations were born. Back home, life felt tightly woven — sometimes beautifully, sometimes suffocatingly — into a web of family, obligations, and unspoken rules. You grow up knowing exactly who you “should” become, because the path is already mapped out by generations before you.

Medicine, law, computers, science — respectable, stable, predictable professions. Business — suspicious, gray, morally questionable, and attractive. Art is not an option; it’s a hobby at best and failure to launch at worst. Your choices are rarely just your own. They belong to the family, the community, the invisible network that raised you.

Then you immigrate. Suddenly the map dissolves.

America doesn’t care who your parents know. It doesn’t care what your last name signals, or at least not so explicitly. It doesn’t care about the hierarchy you grew up inside, at least not until government or “big old money” gets involved.

At first, this feels like freedom. Then it feels like vertigo.

When the old structure falls away, you’re left face-to-face with yourself — not the version shaped by family expectations, but the raw, unfiltered one. The one who has to make decisions without the chorus of “this is how we do things” guiding every step. You will live with those decisions, your family “there” and your new family “here” will too. You will be torn between duties to your family, possibly older parents who live thousands of miles away, and your need to stop surviving, and start living this life, the one you’ve worked so hard to build, only to realize you are just another mice in the mase.

If you are brave enough to have children, the questions multiply.

How do you raise a child between two worlds? How do you give them roots without burying them? How do you give them wings without losing them to a culture that doesn’t fully understand where they came from? The culture that would attempt to lift them up on the elusive wings of “American dream”, potentially at all costs, or to guilt them into something they were not a part of nor had a choice or a say, but now, by being here on this land, they are.

I’ve watched immigrant families swing between extremes. Some cling to their culture with a kind of desperation — language, traditions, career expectations, even the idea of who their child is allowed to love. It’s a way of holding onto themselves in a world that feels too fluid, too fast, too foreign. Others go the opposite direction — full assimilation, as if erasing the past will guarantee belonging: English only, American friends only, traditions replaced with holidays from the mall aisles. And somewhere in that process, the parents lose themselves, while the children grow up not belonging to a fully American “upper middle class”, but also disconnected from any other identity.

I’ve lived long enough in immigration to see the quiet heartbreak on both sides. Parents who feel their children are slipping away; it feels so much harder when the shame of being weird or stigma with their looks are making the separation feel less than a natural process, but a betrayal. Children who feel they must choose between loyalty and authenticity.
Families caught in the crossfire of two cultures that don’t always understand each other.

And then there are the moments when the country you left behind goes to war — and suddenly your identity becomes a political statement. You’re asked to explain, justify, condemn, defend. Your child hears words like “enemy,” “ally,” “traitor,” without understanding why their heritage is being dissected on the evening news. Sometimes it is mixed heritage, that’s the beauty of America; even then, you and your children may have to explain and answer the question “So, where are you from?” I’ve heard it so many times in over 25 years, I lost count. I am from here, the country where I lived most of my life. That’s where I built my identity, or rather trying to build one.

How do you parent through that? How do you teach a child to love where they come from without inheriting the trauma of it? How do you teach your first-generation children to be responsible and love this country, America, without inheriting the trauma, moving past it, and helping to build a better country for all.

I don’t have a perfect answer, but I’ve learned a few things. Mostly the hard way, but occasionally the funny and anecdotal way. I feel the humor sometimes is the missing ingredient to the hard reality we live in.

I feel that children don’t need a rigid cultural script. They need emotional clarity. They may need parents who can say, “This is where we come from, this is what shaped us, and this is what we’re choosing to carry forward. Learn the history and make your own choices”. They also need parents who can admit, with a straight face, that sometimes we have no idea what we’re doing. Which, by the way, is the most universal parenting truth across all cultures. Even American parents don’t know what “spirit week” is until the night before. It’s OK not to understand why each school needs a mascot, just accept that there’s one.

I’ve learned that bilingualism is less about noble cultural preservation and more about shouting, “Speak Russian at home, English outside!” until you eventually give up and accept that your child will answer you in a hybrid language. It’s OK to admit that identity is not a prison or a performance but is a living thing, something they can grow into, shape, question, and redefine without losing the love of the people who raised them. I am curious to see how my children chape up; I just want them to be good people, ideally, who learned what love, happiness, joy and gratefulness look like and knowing how to experience it. I’ve learned that traditions survive not because we force them, but because kids secretly love anything that involves food, fire, a story or staying up late. They don’t need a lecture, just hand them a plate of some homemade comfort food, tell a joke or a story, and suddenly they’re very interested in their roots.

Immigration stripped away the old map, yes. But it also gave me the chance to draw a new one — slowly, imperfectly, with my child walking beside me instead of behind me. Maybe that’s the real inheritance I can offer: not a culture preserved in Baltic amber, not an identity dissolved in assimilation, but a way of living that allows for complexity, curiosity, and choice.

A way of saying: “You come from somewhere. You belong somewhere. You are allowed to become someone.” (Even if that someone occasionally mixes Russian grammar with English slang.)

1. Introduction

Several times a year, I enter a familiar inner landscape — a quiet collapse where interest dissolves, goals lose their meaning, and a kind of spacious emptiness settles in. It feels like depression, but it’s not that. It’s a loss of direction, a fading of motivation, a sense that the life I’m living no longer fits the person I’m becoming.

Nature helps. Family helps. Sometimes friends help.
But the cycle itself feels larger than me — almost like a built‑in mechanism that forces me to pause, shed old layers, and question everything I’ve accepted as “normal.”

And the more I observe the world around me, especially in America, the more I realize: these meetings with emptiness are not a personal failure — they are a natural response to a culture that no longer supports how humans (like me) are meant to live.

2. The Fragility of Modern Connection

One of the most disorienting aspects of modern life is how friendships form and dissolve. Here, relationships are often interest‑based: people bond around hobbies, activities, or shared projects. But when interests shift — even slightly — the friendship quietly fades.

This creates a subtle but painful pattern:

• You try something new.
• You find people who support you — temporarily.
• But the group depends on your participation.
• When you pivot, the group lets you go.

It’s not cruelty. It’s cultural design.
But it leaves a person suspended, unsupported, and alone at the exact moment they are trying to grow.

Many people stay in jobs or lifestyles that don’t fit them simply because they fear losing the few connections they have. And when those connections dissolve anyway, the emptiness deepens.

3. Humans (like me) haven’t evolved for this.

Some of my favorite books are “Sapience” and “Homo Deus” written Y.N. Harari, it took me on a multi-year adventure to try and understand how human socius and “nature” developed from anthropologic dimension.

We like to imagine ourselves as self‑sufficient, but that’s mostly an illusion. Humans are social, embodied, tribal beings. For thousands of years, we survived through:

• movement
• nature
• shared labor
• shared meaning
• stable community

Now, from early childhood, the system is misaligned with our biology.

A child who moves too much “won’t survive” in school.
A teenager who needs nature gets screens instead.
An adult who needs community gets fragmentation.

Layer onto this:
• processed foods → brain fog
• media → unrealistic standards
• virtual reality → detachment
• AI → indistinguishable simulations of people
And children’s brains begin to normalize hours of unreality.
Adults, too.
In such an environment, emptiness is not a malfunction — it’s a message.

4. Emptiness as a Signal, not a Crisis.

What if these recurring collapses — the loss of interest, the fading of goals, the quiet void — are not signs of weakness, but signs of inner intelligence, emotional “tune-in” with inner self?
A recalibration.
A clearing of space.
A refusal to continue on autopilot.
In a world that constantly pushes us toward distraction, productivity, and conformity, emptiness becomes a form of resistance — a way of saying:
“Something in my life no longer aligns with who I am.”
The cycle is not a breakdown.
It’s a breakthrough in slow motion, where you see your life as a movie operator through camera lenses. At this moment comes realization, that YOU are the movie director and the scenario writer too!

5. Finding your Tribe in a Fragmented World.

If modern friendships dissolve when interests shift, then the answer is not to cling harder — it’s to seek a different kind of connection.

Not interest‑based. Inner Values‑based.

People who stay even when your hobbies change.
People who care about your becoming, not your performance.
People who want to grow alongside you, not consume your presence.
This kind of tribe is small — sometimes just two or three people — but it’s enough.
It’s the difference between drifting and belonging.

6. Meaning is Not Found, it’s Cultivated.

The meaning of (my) life is not like a page in an electronic book with an error PAGE NOT FOUND today. Meaning doesn’t appear fully formed.
It grows through:
• cycles of emptiness
• experiments
• shifts
• failures
• new environments
• new people
• new versions of ourselves
The search is not a detour. It is the path. And in a world built on maintaining the Status Quo — where industries profit from our confusion, exhaustion, and disconnection — choosing to search is an act of quiet rebellion.

7. A new way forward.

I don’t yet see a clear societal direction that feels healthy or sustainable. But I do see individuals — sensitive, thoughtful, awake — who are quietly rebuilding their lives around:
• nature
• movement
• real relationships
• honest work
• inner cycles
• small tribes
• meaning over productivity
Maybe the future won’t come from institutions.
Maybe it will come from people who refuse to numb themselves.
People who meet their emptiness instead of running from it.
People who challenge the Status Quo simply by listening to their inner truth.

Humans like me. And you.