When people ask me the common question:”So what do you do?” I used to have a hard time. I did so many things, and could never limit myself to one. I see many opportunities everywhere I go, and only over time became aware that most people don’t think like that.

I grew up in the Netherlands, wasted away at public education just like many others, with many unfulfilled desires. In my early twenties I realized that the ordinary path of studying, getting an office job, lease a car and mortgage a house just wasn’t for me. I left the Netherlands in 2006 and went on to study philosophy at the same university as Socrates.

For three years  I lived in Cyprus where I worked in trust and finance. I got skilled at the computer and learned a trick or two in design, marketing and writing. But most of all, I enjoyed hearing unusual (success) stories of businessmen who had chosen to do things differently. Many of them by accident, some by design, they had come up with business ideas that resulted in more customized, fulfilling individualistic lifestyles.  I met and married a wonderful girl, moved to Panama and became an entrepreneur, designed and build my own hotel. There on the edge of civilization I became what I always wanted to be: self-reliant. In that I found a true calling: I realized I can do a lot more than I thought I could do. Repair stuff, build things, draw plans and make them come to life.
Living in rural Panama on the edge of the jungle, my outlook on the world changed. I love civilization, technology and the products of industrialization. But if I was forced to choose between the two, I choose nature.
My hotel had a good acre of sloped land around it that was severely degraded. I started working the land, building terraces, improving the soil, planting many edible and ornamental plants. I found great joy and satisfaction in the work, even though the sun was often merciless and so were the bugs. The hotel guests became a way to sustain my gardening.

The strain of a business on ones’ private life is enormous; what seemed idyllic for a casual observer became unworkable.  I left Panama by the end of 2017 but not before I completed one personal goal: to build myself a cabin with as little help as possible. For three months I lived without running water, electricity or any form of plumbing. I washed in the river, boiled river water for drinking, and relied on the forest as my bathroom. I slept in a tent, would get up when the roosters started crying and put in as many hours as I could. I booked a flight to Europe and made it my deadline. One week before leaving my bathroom and kitchen were operational. I turned the key and left.

One extraordinary year later I return from to Panama with a lovely Panamanian girl I found in France, with renewed energy. I have many passions and ideas, and I am more ambitious now than ever before. This is what I will do in the coming years:

1. Create a home with art studio for my wife to be and have a family (in progress)
2. Design at least one other building (bigger than my hotel)
3. Reforest a minimum of one square kilometer of land.
4. Never run a hotel-restaurant ever again

It’s about time this page receives an update. But rather than editing it, it is much more fun to tell you how the story continued. The text above was written in 2018, and this update is from 2025. How many of the goals have been realized?
Create a home. This task saw a lot of twists and turns. The cabin that was built in 2017 received an update and some extension, but never enough to make it into a home for a family. This was in part due to the habit of my lovely girl from Panama to fly off to other places and live in multiple countries. These were fun times. It ended as it should, with pregnancy and a healthy baby boy. Meanwhile the great panic of 2020 had broken out, with all its authoritarian restrictions. Fortunately we were reasonably far away from the worst madness, sitting it out in the jungle of Panama with a really cool project. In 2021, the panic continued and Panama started to feel the economic consequences. I visited the a ZEDE in Honduras, a special type of free zone with maximum freedom. Unfortunately the location was not great for attracting people. I wrote a critical piece which went a little viral. Some people asked me what my solution would be for living in freedom. Thus, the Free Commune was born.
We left Panama in December of 2021, moved to the Netherlands for work and started to explore the possibility of starting such a community in Spain. In May 2022 our daughter Catalina was born, and by summer we found a location in Galicia and made our move. Now, two years later, our community is established and growing. We have a house but it’s not a home yet (it lacks insulation and heating). In another year it should be done including the art studio. With the birth of our second daughter Gabriela in May 2024, we certainly have a family.

As for designing a bigger building than Hotel Anachoreo, I still have time. Within our now repopulated village there are many ruins, some of which are beyond restoration. Opportunities will present itself in time.

In some way, goal number three is already achieved. The valley that belongs to the village has been reforresting itself over the last 10 – 20 years. But that is not the last of it! We now have all the land to rewrite the whitepaper from 2019 and set this in motion. Because the last thing I want to do to make ends meet is having a hotel-restaurant 😉