Hi, I’m Henrik.
I grew up in Sweden and now live on a small, pine-covered island in the Baltic Sea with my wife Johanna and our two daughters.
Before becoming a writer, I was a programmer, a factory worker, a poet, a teacher, a lab technician, and a coordinator at an art gallery. It took me a while to figure out what to do with my life.
Much of what I write on this Substack is based on conversations with my wife Johanna, who also does research and helps with the editing of the essays. We met in a bookstore in 2011 and are currently about 10,000 hours into our conversation. I can’t understate how much talking to Johanna has changed me and brought me into deeper contact with myself and reality.
This is how I have described the experience talking to her:
I remember the first time she invited herself to my apartment, how we sat on the balcony, and how I suddenly heard myself say things I had never been able to say before, not even to myself. I felt no shame when she listened. It was, among other things, because of her eyes. What made them light up was the complete and utter opposite of what made the eyes of others light up: if I talked about things that normally earned me admiration, she got bored, but when I spoke about what was private, odd, embarrassing, painful, or taboo, she became curious.
She was also moved by reasons in a way that no one else I knew was. She seemed incapable of accepting as true anything she hadn’t deeply considered herself. Her default position was, “I don’t know.” But if she received information that contradicted her, she eagerly changed her mind. And she treated me as if I lived by that standard, too.
Our writing has appear in WIRED, Asterisk and The Spectator. It has been on Marginal Revolution, the top of HackerNews front page, and Escaping Flatland was one of Substack’s featured publications in 2023 and 2025.
What readers say
“‘Looking for Alice’ is one of my favorite pieces of writing. I revisit it every few months. It helped me formulate a framework that led me to meeting my now girlfriend.”
“I have a snippet of ‘Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process’ printed out on my bedroom wall.”
“Your writing has meaningfully impacted how I think about designing the life I want to live. You help me imagine more for myself.”
“I usually think about the essay I’ve read for the rest of the day. I’ve been forcing myself to swim 60 laps every morning, and I motivate myself by saying: yes, it’s hard, but if you finish you can reward yourself with an iced latte and a Henrik essay.”
If you’re new
These will give you a feel for what happens here:
A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people. On writing as a way to summon your tribe.
Childhoods of exceptional people. What did Virginia Woolf, John von Neumann, and Bertrand Russell’s early years have in common?
Looking for Alice: not dating. How I met Johanna, and what I learned about designing relationships deliberately.
Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process. On finding the right form by listening to context.
On agency. Agency is often framed as hard-edged and aggressive. But talking to highly agentic people, I’ve seen something gentler—an attunement to reality, a finding of the path of least resistance.
The free newsletter comes out whenever I have something new that I have thought through and want to share with the wider world — usually every few weeks. These are the essays I write in collaboration Johanna about relationships, agency, how to think, how to live. My hope is that we will be able to keep these free for everyone forever.
But behind the essays is a whole world: the books and ideas that seed them, the half-formed connections I’m working through, the practical reality of what it actually looks like to try to live this way—on a small island, with kids, with a marriage we’re actively building, with all the fear and friction that comes with living in an unconventional way. The paid subscription is access to that world. There is also, increasingly, a conversation happening among the people here. Many of the paid subscribers are trying to do something similar to what Johanna and I are doing — building a life that makes sense to them, even when it looks strange from the outside. If that is you, it is nice to have company.
But primarily, I encourage people to think about their subscriptions as a way to fund work they want to see more of in the world. This newsletter is my full time job; it is what pays all our bills. If the work Johanna and I do seems worthwhile to you, you can be a part of making it possible by becoming a paid subscriber.
Inquiries:
contact [at] henrikkarlsson.xyz
/Henrik
