Crème de Sens

Tag: everyday life

  • A Liminal Town

    A Liminal Town

    // what attracts people most, it would appear, is other people (c)

    When I moved to one of those Canadian cities that regularly appeared in rankings of the happiest places to live, the first thing I did was go for a walk. It rained during my first few days there, and the streets were completely empty. And I absolutely loved it. I no longer had to weave through crowds or squeeze past endless streams of people. I could walk at my own pace without constantly bumping into anyone. No honking, no rushing, no one smoking next to me.

    After twenty-million-person Istanbul, that kind of silence felt like a luxury. I spent hours wandering through the city, looking at the colorful houses, the trees, and the steep streets. The city’s harsh climate, with its damp air and sharp winds, at first felt like nothing more than part of the atmosphere. Everything looked so new, almost cinematic. At that moment, I thought this was exactly what a truly comfortable city was supposed to feel like.

    But after a couple of months, something strange started to happen. The rain was long gone, the days had become dry and calm, yet the streets were still empty. I would leave the house and catch myself thinking that I didn’t really want to keep walking. For a long time, I couldn’t understand what had changed. Everything around me was still just as clean, peaceful, and well-organized, but somehow my walks were no longer enjoyable.

    There wasn’t really anywhere to go. And it wasn’t because there were no shops or attractions. It was because nothing was happening. Empty streets, deserted parks, half-empty cafés. Sometimes it felt as if I was the only person who had decided to go outside without a specific destination, simply for the sake of walking. I could walk for ten minutes, half an hour, even an hour without seeing anyone. It was as if everyone had disappeared.

    The interesting part was that I wasn’t craving crowds, and I didn’t miss the noise. What I missed was the feeling that the city was alive.

    When there are people around, even if I never interact with them, a city feels alive. Someone is sitting on a café patio, someone is rushing somewhere, kids are coming home from school, someone is reading on a bench. You simply walk past them and feel like you’re part of the city.

    I didn’t need conversations with strangers. I just wanted to see that other people were there: to catch fragments of conversations as I walked by, notice the morning line outside a bakery, smile at people passing by, walk past a street musician, watch someone playing with their dog. It’s these ordinary little moments that make a city feel alive. Without them, walking started to feel emotionally empty.

    Instead, I found myself walking along a wide road past a parking lot, then another block, then another… and absolutely nothing was happening around me.

    That was when I found myself thinking about something I had never considered before. Before moving, I looked at the usual country rankings: safety, income levels, healthcare, cost of living. But it never occurred to me to ask myself a different question:

    Would I actually want to leave the house and simply walk wherever my feet took me?

    Until then, I had never thought of judging a city by whether it made me want to go for a walk. It had always seemed so obvious that I never even considered it a quality worth noticing. It was only after moving that I realized that being able to step outside with no destination and genuinely enjoy the walk itself is also part of quality of life. And that walkability isn’t just about having sidewalks, parks, or short distances. It’s about whether something is actually happening on the street.

  • The Question Behind Crème de Sens

    The Question Behind Crème de Sens

    A few years ago, I moved to a country that regularly appears on lists of the best places in the world to live. These rankings usually measure things like safety, income levels, healthcare, infrastructure, and many other factors that genuinely matter. It seemed perfectly logical to me that if there was a place where a person should feel good, it would be a place like this.

    But after moving, I began to notice a strange feeling. Even though many aspects of life had objectively become more convenient, it didn’t feel better. I found myself thinking more and more about periods of my life when I had far fewer opportunities and much less comfort. What felt especially strange was that those memories often carried more warmth than life in a country considered one of the most comfortable places in the world to live.

    And this wasn’t nostalgia, nor was it a desire to claim that everything used to be better. What interested me was the contradiction itself. I couldn’t understand why it existed. I had moved to a place that is considered one of the best in the world to live, and I expected that better living conditions would automatically lead to a better quality of life. It seemed logical. More opportunities, more convenience, more safety — isn’t that enough to feel happier?

    The more I thought about it, the more I began noticing things I had barely paid attention to before. The way people behave around me. The design of streets and public spaces. How much energy can be drained by noise, visual clutter, and small daily inconveniences. The impact of service quality. What is considered normal and what is not. The emotions created by the spaces where I spend most of my days.

    Gradually, I began to realize that countless things influence my well-being far more than I tend to acknowledge. Over time, we become so accustomed to them that we stop noticing them altogether. But just because we no longer notice something does not mean it has stopped affecting us.

    That was when I became interested in the question that eventually became the foundation of this blog:

    What actually shapes the quality of our lives?

    The more I think about it, the more I believe that the answer lies not only in income, occasional vacations, or isolated happy moments. What matters far more is how an ordinary day feels: what we see every day, what surrounds us, what we consider normal, and what we have stopped questioning.

    Crème de Sens was born from a desire to better understand how the environments around us (physical, social, cultural, and visual) shape our experience of life.

    Here, I explore the places we move through, the standards we accept, the objects we use, the habits we repeat, and all those details of everyday life that have become so familiar we barely notice them anymore. Because the quality of life is determined not only by what we have, but also by what surrounds us every day. And often, the things that influence us most are the things we no longer notice.