Origin

Lithuania

Lithuania: ~2.8 million

I am Lithuanian, although sometimes I feel as if the Lithuania I remember no longer exists in the same form. Still, the Lithuania I believe in — Lietu‑va — lives partly in memory and partly in imagination. I keep that version safe, hoping it can return in a clearer form.

But let’s also understand something: Lithuania is not a large nation with endless natural resources to sell, nor do we have the same obvious advantages that bigger countries may have. We do not have vast reserves or some special wealth to offer the world. In many ways, what we truly have is ourselves — and one another, the people we choose to care for. That is not easy, but we are doing our best.

Lithuania also gave me pride. We have had people with real force: athletes, strongmen, chess players, scientists, artists, and stubborn thinkers. I think of figures whom I had the privilege to meet directly, and whose intelligence and discipline showed another kind of strength.

North and east

Russia: secrets, winter, and spirit

Russia: ~143.4 million

Russia can be divisive in global conversations, and I understand why. Still, when I think about ordinary Russian people and culture, I also think about endurance: brutal winters, deep literature, quiet warmth, science, the study of Venus and the ingenuity behind it, sacrifice, humour, songs, and hidden heroes whose names may never become famous.

I also remember moments when Russian people felt like protectors — helping carry people through cold winters, both literal and metaphorical. There is a warmth there that is not always visible from the outside, but it exists quietly, in people, in small acts, and in the strength to keep going.

I once touched a matryoshka during a magic-traveling memory, and something happened — as if it held a memory I had not fully recovered. Maybe that memory will return stronger one day.

Ordinary people still have families, fears, memories, kindness, and longing. We have shared this Earth across millions of years of time, far longer than the anomalies we see today. I do not want those temporary divisions to erase that deeper human truth.

Strength and soil

Ukraine: strength felt from afar

Ukraine: ~39.5 million

When I think of Ukraine, I think of strength and almost infinite growth. I think of food, sun, wide fields, firm ground, and beautiful, strong people standing on that ground with steadiness beneath their feet.

I also think of courage that is not loud for the sake of being loud, but steady — the kind of courage that comes from knowing who you are, where you stand, and what must be cared for. There is dignity in that strength. There is patience in it. There is a deep connection between people and land, between sun and field, between hardship and growth.

Even while standing in Lithuania, I feel that firmness from far away — as if the land itself carries weight, warmth, and certainty across distance. Ukraine feels rooted, fertile, and alive to me, like a place where growth keeps pushing upward no matter what tries to press it down.

Across the Atlantic

United States: bold in pursuit

US: ~349.0 million

The United States feels intense to me. Their push for improvement often comes with a heavy price, but they keep moving, keep building, keep forcing new doors open. They break barriers and step into the unknown with a restless energy the world cannot ignore.

Sometimes I wonder how the USA is actually doing beyond headlines, screens, and arguments.

From here, ordinary life there can feel far away and hard to understand. Most of us cannot simply visit often enough to know what daily reality really feels like. I hope technology, travel, and honest conversation eventually help people understand one another with less distortion.

Scale and structure

China: builders of our shared world

China: ~1.413 billion

China stands to me as proof of collective effort on a scale that is hard to grasp. So much of the modern world depends on what has been built there, often through sacrifice the rest of us may never fully understand. From Lithuania — a tiny country, known by only a few in comparison — I can only look on with humility and awe.

Look past stereotypes and there is youth culture, technology, discipline, experimentation, cosplay, tradition, futurism, and ancient continuity all woven together. That ability to move as both an old civilization and a modern force is something I deeply respect.

Studying the language gave me a sense of openness I did not expect. It felt as though meaning could arrive before explanation, as if the symbols themselves invited attention before thought became noisy.

Even the Lithuanian word Kinija stirs something in me. To my ear, it sounds as though it could mean “the land of ki,” the land of energy. This is only my own association, not a linguistic claim — but I like what it suggests, and I feel it reflects something real in my imagination.

Precision, grace, and honeycomb

Japan and Korea: sharp minds, ancient elegance, careful creation

Japan: ~122 million people
The Koreas: ~78 million people

I have long admired the precision and elegance of Japanese culture. Their attention to detail — in food, design, craft, robotics, ritual, and language — reached me strongly when I was younger. Japan reminded me to stay sharp and persevere even when the world around me felt unstable. There is a disciplined beauty there that does not need to shout.

I have also always wanted to visit Japan, China, and Korea: to walk their streets, learn from their people, and experience those cultures firsthand instead of only through distance and projection.

In Lithuanian, Korėja reminds me of korys — a honeycomb, something built together cell by cell. So I imagine Korea as a place of care, organization, intelligence, beauty, and creation.

Have you seen how smart, thoughtful, and beautiful their people are?

The sad truth is that, from where I stand, this dream can feel almost impossible. It is not only far beyond the budget of ordinary people; even the idea of arriving there can feel like stepping into a completely unfamiliar world.

I wonder whether they would also like to be invited, cared for, and shown around this world properly. Simply arriving, walking around, going to a coffee shop, and going home is not the same as truly being with someone. Maybe the deeper dream is not just tourism, but building a shared world together.

Would I personally like to live there? Of course. I have lived in Europe all my life. We know each other more than well enough. For the second quarter of my life, I would love to be there. It is just not that simple.

Maybe one day they would like to visit us.

Depth

India: wells of wisdom

India: ~1.477 billion

India feels to me like an endless well — ready to be filled and refilled with knowledge, philosophy, spirituality, contradiction, beauty, and truth. On a chaotic and overloaded planet, India’s ancient depth still shines through.

From meditation and metaphysics to festivals, color, language, mathematics, food, music, and living tradition, there is a timeless thread there that seems capable of carrying people even through their hardest seasons.

Self-restraint

Muslim-majority societies: clarity and restraint

Muslim-majority societies: ~2.0 billion

When I first learned about societies where alcohol was banned or tightly restricted, it felt foreign to me. Later, I began to understand the strength inside that choice. It is not only prohibition; it can also be a statement that a society does not have to drown itself in order to cope.

Where I grew up, drunkenness was common and often destructive. Knowing there were places trying to resist that norm gave me something like hope. The world needs more examples of self-restraint, not fewer.

I know Muslim-majority societies are not all the same. They contain many cultures, languages, arguments, histories, and ways of life. What I admire here is one visible principle: the courage to say that not every appetite should rule us.

Scale, wound, beauty

Africa: red skies and unspoken stories

Africa: ~1.58 billion

Africa is not one simple place. It is an immense and diverse continent, with countless peoples, languages, histories, cities, landscapes, and futures. It has also been scarred by histories of extraction, violence, theft, and outside misunderstanding.

People warned me it was dangerous, that anger ran deep. The more I learned, the more I understood why anger would exist in places where so much had been taken or distorted.

And what reaches me most strongly is still beauty: natural beauty, cultural richness, human strength, music, color, rhythm, survival, and stories too large to be reduced to fear. I also believe there are forms of building that only people rooted there can fully imagine: technologies, creations, and futures shaped by their own homes, needs, skies, and knowledge. I hope one day to stand under those red skies with the respect they deserve.

Forest and altitude

Brazil and Peru: endless forests and ancient echoes

Brazil and Peru: ~248.1 million

Flying over Brazil, the forests seem to go on forever — like a breathing ocean of green. The Amazon still feels magical to me, mysterious even to those who live close to it. Brazil carries a cultural force that invites people to live in full color: music, movement, celebration, pulse.

Peru evokes something different in me: mountains, stone, altitude, old memory, and civilizations that still echo through the landscape. Both places feel large in ways that exceed maps.

Many languages, one table

Europe: unity without sameness

Europe: ~743.7 million

Europe is one of the most interesting human projects on Earth — and it is also where my home is. We are not one simple culture. We are many languages, many memories, many old wounds, many styles of humor, many foods, many songs, many ways of dreaming, thinking, building, arguing, and celebrating.

And somehow, again and again, we still try to sit at the same table.

That is beautiful. Europe’s strength is not that everyone becomes the same. Its strength is that very different people can remain themselves while learning how to cooperate. Europe is at its best when it does not erase differences, but turns them into connection.

At the same time, Europe has a long history of being pulled into conflict. Sometimes it feels like our tragic loop: we repeat the cycle, fail to learn, then call the repetition destiny. That is why I keep looking outward too — toward nations that hold different habits of restraint, invention, patience, or compassion.

I once nearly died — literally and figuratively — and was brought back. It taught me how finite time really is. We all go away in the end, enemies and friends alike.

So why waste precious days on hate? Why not choose love, curiosity, and the wonder each person and each country still carries?

Maybe that sounds naïve. Fine. I have decided to embrace that naïveté rather than live inside permanent suspicion. There is freedom in dropping the tribal reflex and choosing to see people as human first.

Reality check

Europe’s health and control illusion

I also want to keep one hard reality check about care for people. According to WHO/Europe’s 2024 reporting, tobacco, ultra-processed foods, fossil fuels, and alcohol are wholly or partly linked to about 2.7 million deaths per year in the WHO European Region. Numbers cannot carry grief, but they can sharpen moral focus.

If human life truly matters, then both policy and habit should show it. It is easy to speak the language of protection while accepting preventable harm as normal. That contradiction is painful to look at, but we should look at it anyway.

This is not about blaming ordinary people. It is about asking whether the systems around us help people live, or quietly profit while people become weaker, sicker, more isolated, and more dependent.

Grief and nearness

The tragedy in Ukraine

Combined total: 1.6–2.1 million — almost equal to the entire Lithuanian population; in this irreversible universe, during this brief time period of our existence, it is as if a whole nation’s worth of people were erased, broken, or left carrying the weight of it.

I keep this part separate because the tragedy deserves its own space. I do not know enough to speak with authority about everything behind it, but I know enough to feel grief. I want people safe. I want the suffering to stop. I want healing to begin as soon as possible.

What makes it even harder for me is that, when I look at Ukraine and Russia, I do not first see abstraction. I see closeness. I see something that feels brotherly in my heart. It is simply the emotional image through which I feel the wound.

And that is why the harm feels so painful: when people who are close are torn apart, everyone around them feels the shock. The wound does not stay in one place. It reaches outward.

I suspect tragedies like this are never only about ordinary people. Larger forces — political, military, economic, informational, psychological — push human beings into positions they may never truly have chosen, and then call the result inevitable. But there is nothing ordinary or acceptable about human lives being crushed in the process.

The human thing. What I have found is that those with the strongest and most caring connections can sometimes be affected the most, because they know and care for each other so deeply. It can feel as if a toxic stimulus coming from somewhere is influencing the connection itself — whether that stimulus is illness, fear, trauma, manipulation, mass tension, spiritual pressure, or something we do not yet understand.

When someone tries to seek help while in a very bad state of mind, the call can arrive in a distorted form. What was meant as a call for help and connection can trigger conflict instead. A person may be asking, “please reach me,” but the other person hears harm, blame, or danger. This is how relationships sometimes turn: love is still there, but exhaustion, fear, and mental overload turn the bridge into a void.

That does not mean deep love is the problem. It means deep connection needs protection. The people who care most may need the most patience, rest, clarity, and safe support, especially when COVID, pressure, or unseen influence has made them weaker and more susceptible. Sadly, there are also systems that fuel conflict instead of helping; they use vulnerable minds when those minds need rest and recovery.

No child, no family, no people should be turned into fuel for history, strategy, or ambition. Whatever sits behind such devastation, the human cost is beyond comprehension.

So I return to the smallest rule I know: be gentle where you still can. Treat others as you would want to be treated. Do not provoke cruelty where kindness is still possible. Peace begins in small choices long before it is ever written into history.