A name for the life I wanted

In the summer of 2022 I was on a half-year sabbatical, and most afternoons I ended up at Parc La Fontaine with friends. We’d bring food, find a spot on the grass, and stay there for hours with no plan for what came after. One of those afternoons I looked around at everyone and thought, very clearly, that this is what I wanted my life to be about.

For most of my twenties it hadn’t been about this at all. My life was a hustle. I was trying to be independent, trying to prove myself to the world, always moving to the next thing before the current one was finished. I was rarely in the room I was actually in. That afternoon in the park was one of the first times in years I wasn’t doing that. I was just there, with the people I was with.

I didn’t decide anything dramatic that day. I just knew I wanted more afternoons that felt like that one, and fewer that felt like the chase. So that’s what I’ve slowly been building my life around since. Being present with the people in front of me. Choosing the slow version on purpose.

I didn’t have a word for any of this at the time. A few years later I was scrolling reddit and came across a thread on r/todayilearned about fika. Fika is a Swedish habit. You stop, you have coffee, you sit with the people you’re with, and that’s the whole thing. No rush, no agenda. Reading it, I realized I’d been reaching for fika for years without knowing it had a name. I hadn’t adopted a concept. I’d just been living a certain way, and someone in Sweden already had a word for it.

So when Maurice and I needed a name for the group-trip product we’re building, fika was already the word I was living by. The product became fikastay. I’ve told the story of that rename already, so I won’t redo it here. The part I left out is that it never really felt like a product decision. The name came from the same place the rest of my life has been coming from lately.

I’m building fikastay slowly. I have a full-time job, so most of it gets made early in the morning, before the world wakes up. I’m a morning person, and there’s something about that quiet hour before anything is demanding my time that lets me work without feeling pushed to rush on to the next thing. For a while the slow pace bothered me, like I was being too slow to be serious. Now it feels right that something that came out of choosing the slow version would also get built the slow way. I’m not in a rush with it, the same way I’m trying not to be in a rush with anything that matters anymore.

I named the product after a life I wanted before I had a word for either of them. Most days now look a little more like that afternoon in the park than they used to. That’s what I’m actually building, and it’s enough for me right now.