Life is a treasure hunt.
It is not a journey you can make with someone else’s map. It begins only when you learn to follow the map hidden deep inside you. You have to choose for yourself.
From time to time, I ask people I meet a simple question.
“What is your treasure?”
Most people cannot answer right away. Some tilt their heads, unsure. Others brush it off as if it were a joke. Whenever that happens, I smile, because I once did the same. I postponed that question for a very long time.
For many years, I was an engineering professor. I studied AI, built machines and robots, and spoke about the future. From the outside, it must have looked like a decent path—a respectable job, a proper title, a stable life. And perhaps it was. But it was also a path that had already bent once. I had been looking in a different direction to begin with.
I was always drawn to the questions behind every choice—why people choose, where they stop, and why some turn away while others keep going to the very end.
For a while, I lived as if I had set those questions aside. But my treasure did not disappear. It was simply out of sight. Then, little by little, it began to reveal itself again.
At fifty-seven, I decided to walk a path that had finally become clear. People called it early retirement. I called it something else.
A transition.
From engineering to philosophy.
Strangely, it felt light. Like resuming a game that had been paused for a very long time. So I began asking again.
“What is your treasure?”
Some questions make a person stop. And sometimes, a single question can redirect an entire life.
This story begins with that movement.