Writing about what it means to be human.
Books about dating, loneliness, boundaries, identity and belonging. Different corners of the same question: how do we understand ourselves, and each other, a little better?
Swiping for Something Real
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Dating in the age of apps promises connection but often delivers something hollower, a loop of swipes, matches and vanishings that leaves us more depleted than before. For queer people navigating a world that was never quite built for us, the exhaustion runs even deeper.
Swiping for Something Real is a grounded, honest exploration of why modern dating feels so hard, and what it might look like to do it differently. Pieter Niemann asks the questions most dating books avoid:
This is not a guide to getting someone to love you. It's an invitation to stop performing for love and start inhabiting it. For anyone who has ever swiped, hoped, been ghosted, and still believed something real was possible.
He writes like someone genuinely curious about the reader, naming the exact texture of a private struggle, and showing, without rushing, that it is a part of being human rather than a personal failing.
Pieter Niemann is an author. He writes a series of books about what it means to be human, each one exploring a different corner of the same question: how do we understand ourselves and each other a little better?
He grew up in South Africa and trained as a Registered Counsellor, with further study in addiction care, behavioural science, sexology and gender studies. A move to Switzerland, where he now lives, reshaped everything. That background sits beneath the writing rather than in front of it.
His work carries a particular resonance for readers who have had to navigate a world that wasn't quite built for them. The universal doorway, though, is simply anyone trying to be human.
Read the full storyNotes on being human
When trying harder isn't the answer
Most advice about loneliness tells us to try harder. But if you have been doing that and still feel unseen, the real question may be a different one.
Read →The myth of being ready
Readiness is often used to keep people at a distance. The real measure may be willingness, and that changes what we ask of ourselves.
Read →Being single as a full season
Being single is a full season of life, not a waiting room. Holding that, honestly, opens a gentler and more useful way to think about connection.
Read →A more personal kind of note
Occasional letters on connection, loneliness and being human, plus first word on the book. Written to help you feel a little less confused, a little less alone, and a little more at home in your own humanity.