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. That’s part of why I write about it.
I also often write about relationships and conversation. 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 when I have something to say—usually every few weeks.
Paid subscribers get twice as many essays, including the more personal and experimental ones I don’t feel comfortable sending to everyone. 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. And if the work Johanna and I do seems worthwhile to you, you can be a part of making it possible.
/Henrik
