PioWrites

A Lifestyle Business

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 20:47:11 +0100

I’m on a strange journey for a while now. Strange because everything around breaks.

I’ve never had such destruction happening around me: broken items, broken down cars, broken relationships…nothing really purposfully, hard to explain.

For a while even I lost my most precious gift of ability to fix things. Whenever I tried to fix a simple thing, I’d brake it even more. Strange.

I stopped trying and I let all fall apart.

Clips

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:22:43 +0100

Sometimes a curiosity extracts me from comfort zone, propels me out of the cozy village in central Portugal where I live, and stirs conversations with people I’ve never met. Strangers become familiar, and sometimes they stay as friends. What could be better than that?

Well…when I come back to my comfort, take the A6-sized notepad with notes, and listen to the recorded conversations, and…write (which, again, can be uncomfrotable).

Below a few deeper articles, a 5 minutes (or less) reads that can stretch your wordview.

When I slipped away from a strictly planned trip

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 19:11:33 +0100

I parked my car off the road Estrada das Hortas, just next to an access road to the forest, around 2.4 km from Louzanpark. Since the dirt road is unattractive, to an untrained eye, most people drive further to Chiqueiro, Casal Novo or Talasnal. And that means fewer humans, more wild boar. I walk for about twenty minutes on the dirt road that squiggles as if it was contour line of the topographic map but inclines steadily. It’s sunny. The valley makes me think about Redwood National Park, maybe because of the huge tree trunks–for local standards.

Free the Nature

Thu, 18 Sep 2025 19:09:36 +0100

When I sit in a place where nature is, how can I say, well, free to be natural, I don’t desire to read the breaking news, I don’t desire to work, I don’t desire to be productive, no. It’s strange feeling, my friend, to feel no desire to be distracted.

But distracted from what?

The attention merchants grew, and now they can harvest on an industrial scale. Nothing is left for me. Who am I?

I'm a Renaissance Man, but I Burn Modern

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 19:05:38 +0100

My hands were painfully tired, unable to maneuver my 1000W electric hammer. I haven’t been doing this for a while now, actually, I’ve never been taking so much cement plaster off the wall. It’s an old wall, deep red and beige sandstone letting the cement shell fall freely, but the shell is strong. And under, smells like turned soil after the rain. Plaster doesn’t let the moisture go - it keeps it like a sponge - and the stone wall, until now, was slowly eroding. It’ll breathe now.

This Is the End

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 15:22:43 +0100

It is an end of January and I feel that I run out of any independent thought.

Not only independent but any. This must be a brain rot. I was sick whole January, and maybe that is why I only scrolled; I never was into that. Moreover, I have no curiosity in me. I feel intro and I don’t feel like anything outro.

I went swimming today, but that was rubbish – I lost my breath after a hundred metres. I tried to contemplate life, but that turned out to be boring. I had an idea to cook something tasty, but I lost sense of taste, and, if that’s not enough, my stomach felt disinterested, so we could not find a meaningful compromise.

Who's Pio?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

“What you do for a living?” He countered.

Parent’s gatherings is something new to me and will never cease to amaze me, I think. Our preschool-aged kids imagine that we adults know everything. I see us as kids, a little older, only pretending to know.

He was a tall, of balanced proportions, dad wearing a grey neck jumper and beige chinos appropriate for a work meeting, if it’s a tech startup, as well as for a casual chat about the kids. We were standing in the shade next to a swimming pool that came with a palm tree and a house he and his wife bought last winter. I was staring at his fully red trainers, trying, with no success, to decode their brand.