About

I'm Etan, nice to meet you!

I’m 18 years old, I live in Amsterdam, I’m in my last year of high school and I welcome you to my Paideia Pursuit. Here I talk about two of my favourite things to do on this earth: reading and running. 


These two hobbies are valuable to me in so many ways. Not only because I thoroughly enjoy burying my nose in a book or seeking out that runner’s high, but because I feel like I’m simultaneously improving myself as a person.  


I might be too young to say this, but: life is short. I want to use the time I have to improve myself and have fun while doing it. Running and reading provide that for me. Keeping fit is essential if you want to have a long happy life and constantly challenging yourself intellectualy is as well.  


On this blog I want to share my passion for these hobbies, hopefully entertain and maybe even inspire. I hope you stick around and enjoy my blog. I’ll be posting weekly, so a new post is never far-off!

My philosophy

Philosophy is one of the fields that I am most interested in. I think it’s amazing how philosphy tries to find answers to so many different questions regarding our existense. One of those questions being: what should you do with the limited time given to you? 

Even though I’m still young and have more time left than most people, I wanted to start thinking about this now. That way I hopefully won’t have any regrets. My first answer to the question above was that pleasure should be the thing you fill your life with. But after further contemplation, I decided that I also wanted to develop as a human being and not just have fun. These thoughts led me to a concept that finds its origin in Ancient Greece and is called: Paideia. 

Paideia was an eductional principle that strived to mold the perfect Greek citizen. The thing that really sold me on Paideia was the fact that it valued intellectual development equally as much as physical development. The soul and the body must both be subject to improvement. For me Paideia is a way to give meaning to this crazy thing we call life.

My goals

Reading goals

2025: 

  • 30 books in total
  • One auto-biography 
  • One horror novel 
  • One Shakespeare play
  • One Jane austen novel
  • One philosophical work

Long term:

  • 1000 books before I’m 50 years old
  • Reading a broad variety of books from all different genres

Running goals

2025:

  • Being able to run a half marathon
  • Participating in a minimum of 4 running eventsĀ 
  • Training consistently 3x a week

Long term:

  • Running one marathon a year for as long as I can