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.