How I Think No. 001 - A thought about GLOW

I was thinking about capitalism the other day. Not because I think capitalism is bad. That wouldn't make much sense coming from someone actively building businesses.

What I found myself thinking about was why certain things bother me. And for a while I couldn't connect the dots. A business built purely because something is trending. A restaurant built around a concept that feels disconnected from its source. A wellness trend stripped of everything that made it meaningful. Different topics but the same feeling every time.

And then it clicked.

What bothers me is not difference. It is not growth, profit, or cultural exchange. It is lack of substance. More specifically it is the absence of genuine curiosity about the thing you are building around.

Let me give you a specific example.

I once knew a Spanish chef running a Japanese fusion restaurant in Bangkok. He had lived in Asia for around eight years. As a Japanese person myself, I naturally assumed we would end up having conversations about Japan. That he would be curious. That he would want to go deeper into the culture behind the food he was building a business around.

He never asked.Not once.

I want to pause on that for a second. Because I was right there. Half Japanese. Raised in Japan. Someone who could have told him anything he wanted to know about the food, the culture, the craft, the nuance, the things you only understand from actually being there. A primary source. Free. Available. Clearly willing to talk.

He never asked me a single thing about Japan.

About six months into knowing him I found out he had never been to Japan either. Not once. Eight years in Asia. A Japanese fusion restaurant. Never been. So I asked him about it. His answer was that he was busy.

Busy.

Eight years. A two hour flight. Cheap tickets available pretty much any weekend. And his stated hobbies were food and coffee. Food and coffee. The two things Japan does with arguably more obsessive depth than anywhere else on earth.

Too busy to go. Too busy to ask. And, I later found out, he did not own any books. Not one. Which means no trips, no conversations, no reading. Just a menu and whatever he could piece together from proximity and Pinterest.

When he finally did go he spent five days in Tokyo and Osaka. I remember him telling me he wasn't sure about eating ramen in Japan because there were already so many ramen spots in Bangkok.

He was a chef. In Osaka. For the first time in his life. Unsure about eating ramen in Japan.

I genuinely did not know whether to laugh or cry.But the part that really stayed with me came later. I looked at his website after the trip and it said he was inspired by his time in Tokyo. It mentioned years spent in Tokyo kitchens. The trip had been five days. It was his first time in the country.

I want to be clear. I am not sharing this to be unkind. I am sharing it because it illustrates something I cannot stop thinking about.

There is a version of building that is essentially aesthetic assembly. You identify something that has cultural weight, visual appeal, or market demand. You extract the surface elements. You combine them with other surface elements. You present the result as inspired, authentic, fusion. And it can look completely fine. It can even be commercially successful.

But something is missing. And people feel it even when they cannot name it.

The missing thing is genuine curiosity. The desire to actually go deeper into the source. To understand not just what something looks like but where it comes from, what it means, who made it and why, what you lose when you remove it from its context.

Curious people ask questions. Especially when the answer is sitting right across from them. You do not need a flight to Tokyo to start going deeper into Japanese culture when you have a Japanese person in front of you who grew up there. Zero cost. Zero travel. Zero scheduling conflict. Just the simple act of asking.

He could not even do that.A dish claiming inspiration from misozuke cheese that is actually a Pinterest recipe is not fusion. It is decoration. And there is a meaningful difference between the two even if they look identical on a plate.I knew this chef for about a year. By that logic I should probably be claiming deep Barcelona influences in my work by now. Years immersed in Catalan culture. Deeply inspired by my time in Spain. One year. Knew a guy. Never visited.

The absurdity is obvious when you flip it. But somehow it is less obvious when it goes the other way.

I am interested in the layers behind things. The people, the craft, the curiosity, the contribution, the story. When those layers are missing something feels hollow even if the surface looks polished. And I think most people feel that hollowness even when they cannot articulate it. There is a specific flatness to things built without genuine relationship to their source.

This is probably why I became so interested in GLOW.

Because GLOW, at least in my own work, is not about appearance or trends or performance. GLOW is what happens when depth is present. When something is genuinely connected to meaning. When there is a real relationship between the thing and the people involved in creating it. When curiosity was actually present in the building process.

I notice this in how I move through the world. If I eat Peruvian food I want to know more about it. If I discover a new place I want to understand it. If I encounter a business I want to know why it actually exists. Not because I have to. Because the more dimensions I understand the more alive something becomes. The experience gets richer. The thing becomes more real.

Maybe that is what I am actually trying to build through Amplified Holistic Wellness. Not more information. Not more content. More dimensions. More substance. More genuine curiosity about the thing you are building and the people it is built for.

More GLOW.

Because five days in Tokyo does not become years in a Tokyo kitchen just because you put it on a website. Depth cannot be faked. Proximity is not the same as understanding. And the people who have actually gone deeper always know the difference.

Too busy is never really about time. It is about whether something actually matters enough to you to go looking for it.

And if it does not matter enough to look, maybe it should not be on the menu.

xoxo,

Aisha