Can We Create a New Culture?

For years I sat in boardrooms optimizing for metrics I never chose. Then I sat in silence for ten days on a Vipassana course and something shifted — not a conclusion, but a question. If culture is what we agree to repeat, could we agree to repeat something else?

The Question I Keep Returning To

I keep asking myself: how did we get here? Not to blame, not to fix — just to look. We live inside a culture that seems to have arrived without our consent. Constant notifications. Productivity as identity. Bodies treated like inconvenient hardware carrying a busy mind. And yet, when I walk through Warsaw at dawn, or watch my grandmother knead dough, or feel the breath at the edge of a nostril in meditation — something older is still here. It never left.

So the question is not whether we can invent a new culture from scratch. The question I keep returning to is softer: what if the seeds are already planted, and the work is only to notice them, water them, let them grow?

The Seeds That Never Died

I think about my grandmother often. She did not call it mindfulness when she stirred soup for forty minutes. She did not call it Ayurveda when she told me to drink warm water in winter and stay away from ice. She did not call it somatic healing when she pressed her thumbs into my shoulders after I had cried. She just did these things. And her mother did them. And someone before that.

What we call "wellness" today — the apps, the retreats, the supplements — feels new. But when I look closer, I find the shape of something very old wearing new clothes. Vipassana is 2,500 years old. Ayurveda is older. Thai massage traces its lineage to Jivaka Komarabhacca, physician to the Buddha. Polish herbal traditions, Sufi breath practices, Japanese tea ceremony, Andean coca ceremonies — these are not lifestyle trends. They are surviving fragments of cultures that once knew how to live inside a body.

I made a small table for myself, trying to see the pattern. I share it here not as truth but as a sketch:

What modern culture calls it	What older cultures called it	The common seed
Mindfulness app	Sati (Pali), Dhikr (Arabic), Modlitwa serca (Polish Orthodox)	Attention to this moment
Circadian rhythm optimization	Dinacharya (Ayurveda), monastic hours	Living with the sun
Cold plunge	Morsowanie, Scandinavian sauna cycles, Tummo	Deliberate discomfort as teacher
Somatic therapy	Thai Nuad Boran, Chinese Tui Na, Slavic bath rituals	The body remembers
Digital detox	Sabbath, Vipassana silence, Ramadan	Deliberate absence
Community	Wspólnota, Sangha, Ubuntu	You are not alone
Purpose coaching	Dharma, Ikigai, Zawód as calling	A life pointed somewhere

When I look at this table I do not feel we are inventing. I feel we are remembering. Slowly. Awkwardly. Sometimes badly — packaging ancient medicine into subscription models. But remembering.

And I wonder if that is how new culture always emerges. Not by revolution, but by re-membering — putting the members back together. My CEO life taught me that no organization creates itself from nothing. It borrows, adapts, forgets, remembers. Culture might be the same.

There is a Polish word I love: tęsknota. It means longing, but a longing for something you may never have had. A longing for home even when you are home. I feel tęsknota in the people around me. In my colleagues who have everything and sleep badly. In the founders I mentor who cannot rest. In myself, honestly, most of the time. This longing is not weakness. It might be information. It might be the seed asking for water.

So when I ask "can we create a new culture," I no longer mean invent. I mean: can we give ourselves permission to remember what we already know? Can we sit down to eat without a screen? Can we walk without a destination? Can we let a child be bored? Can we let a body ache without medicating the ache before we have listened to it?

I do not know. But I notice more people asking. And that itself is culture beginning to shift.

Beneath the Question

Under the question of culture, there is a quieter question. Who is the "we" that would create this new culture?

In Vipassana, I met the observation that there is no fixed "I" doing the observing. Sensations arise and pass. Thoughts arise and pass. The one who thinks they are "creating culture" is itself a passing pattern. This is not nihilism. It is, for me, the opposite — it is relief. If I am not a fixed entity building a monument, then I am simply a temporary guest, participating in something larger than my little decade of consciousness.

Culture is not built by heroes. It is built by millions of small, unglamorous choices repeated across generations. What I eat for breakfast. How I speak to the person cleaning the office. Whether I look up from my phone when a long-time friend enters the room. Whether I let silence be silence.

I think the old cultures knew this. They did not entrust culture to a founder or a CEO. They entrusted it to grandmothers, to seasons, to daily rituals so small they seemed like nothing. That is where the seeds are. Not in manifestos.

What I Am Still Learning

I am still learning that I do not have to fix anything. That noticing is already an action. That my meditation practice is not separate from my leadership, and my leadership is not separate from how I greet the doorman.

I am learning that I contradict myself constantly. I write about presence and check my phone. I speak of the ancient body and eat lunch too fast. I am not a teacher. I am a slow student, and some days a very slow one.

Maybe a new culture will not come from those who have arrived. Maybe it will come from those of us still stumbling, still asking, still willing to admit we do not know. If so, I qualify. And perhaps you do too.

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FAQ

Q: Are you saying modern culture is bad? A: No. I am asking how we got here and what we might have forgotten. Judgment tends to close inquiry. I want to keep the inquiry open.

Q: Isn't it romantic to idealize old traditions? A: Yes, it can be. Old cultures also had suffering, injustice, ignorance. I am not proposing we return to the past. I am proposing we notice which seeds are worth watering forward.

Q: How do you reconcile being a CEO with these ideas? A: I do not fully. I live inside the tension. But I have found that the more I practice, the more my work becomes an extension of practice rather than an escape from it.

Q: Where does one begin? A: For me it was one hour of silence a day. Not meditation with a capital M — just silence. Whatever comes from that silence tends to guide the next step.

Q: Do I need to go to a Vipassana course? A: No. Vipassana was my door. Yours might be a walk, a prayer, a garden, a grandmother. The door matters less than walking through one.

Q: Is technology the enemy? A: I do not think so. I run a technology company. The question is whether the tool serves attention or steals it. That is a design question, and also a personal one.

Q: What is the one seed you would water first? A: Slowness. Almost everything I care about grows from letting things take the time they need. Food, conversation, healing, decisions. Slowness is not a technique. It is a permission.

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Paweł Sokołowski is a CEO, Vipassana meditator, and student of Ayurveda and Thai massage. He writes from the intersection of technology, consciousness, and the ancient body.

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