The sea does not explain itself

Hammamet · On slowness, the architecture of idleness, and what the water already knows

By Mohamed Bliwa · May 2026 · 9 min read

I want to begin with a confession: I did not go to Hammamet to think. I went because I was tired, and because the sea was two hours away, and because sometimes the body makes better decisions than the mind.

There is a particular quality of light in Hammamet in the late morning that I have not encountered anywhere else — not in Doha's glass towers, not in Marrakech's medina at dusk, not in Tunis at any hour. It comes off the water at an angle that makes everything look slightly recalled, like a photograph developed not quite right. The whitewashed walls of the old medina absorb it and give it back warmer. The jasmine, which is everywhere, seems to hoard it.

I arrived in the off-season, which is the only honest way to arrive. In summer, Hammamet is a different city — a city performing itself for an audience. In May, before the European tourists descend, it breathes. The beach is long and mostly empty. The calèche horses wait in the shade with the patience of animals who have learned that time moves differently here.

The geometry of doing nothing

The medina of Hammamet is small by the standards of Tunis or Marrakech. You can walk it entirely in twenty minutes. And yet I spent most of two mornings inside it, moving slowly, doubling back, sitting in the doorway of a café I had already visited twice.

What it lacks in scale it compensates for in proportion. The streets are exactly the width of a conversation. Two people walking in opposite directions must negotiate, briefly, the geometry of passing — a slight turn of the shoulder, a nod, an adjustment. This negotiation happens dozens of times an hour and each instance is, technically, a social interaction. A contact. A moment of mutual recognition.

I have been thinking, in my work at Syla, about the friction of connectivity — how we can reduce it, route around it, smooth it away. The Hammamet medina made me wonder whether some friction is not a bug in the system but the system itself. Whether the shoulder turn is the point.

The sea does not explain itself. It simply arrives, recedes, and arrives again. There is a lesson in this that I keep failing to apply to my product roadmap.

On the fort and the horizon

The kasbah sits at the edge of the medina, and at the edge of the kasbah is the sea. I climbed to the top late in the afternoon, when the light was starting to change from white to amber, and stood on the ramparts looking south toward the Gulf of Hammamet.

Fortifications are designed to make distance legible — to transform the horizon from a limit into information. Standing there, I understood why ancient cities chose their edges carefully. The wall is not only protection; it is a thinking tool. It gives you a frame. It tells you: inside here is the known. Outside there is what we are prepared for.

I build software with a similar logic. Every API boundary is a wall. Every authentication layer is a gate. The question that the kasbah asks, and that I have been too busy to hear clearly until now, is: what are you protecting, and from what, and at what cost to the view?

You cannot stand on a wall and not see past it. Defense and exposure are the same posture.

The fishermen's patience

Each morning, before the city woke completely, I walked to the port. The fishing boats had already been out and returned; the catch was sorted, the ice applied, the transaction completed. By the time I arrived, the fishermen were sitting in groups, mending nets or doing nothing in particular, with the unhurried quality of people whose work is already done.

I watched one man repair a net for almost an hour. It is delicate work — systematic, repetitive, requiring a particular kind of attention that is focused but not tense. He worked through it the way you work through a problem you understand completely: without urgency, without drama, without looking up to check whether anyone was watching.

I found this unexpectedly moving. In the startup world, we have a word for this quality of attention — we call it "deep work" and we schedule it and protect it and apologize when meetings interrupt it. This man had no word for it. He was just fixing his net.

There is a kind of knowledge that does not require a framework to exist. It predates the framework. It will survive the framework. Hammamet is full of it.

What the water already knows

On my last evening, I swam. The water in May is cold enough to be serious — it does not allow distraction. You are either in it or you are out of it, and the decision is total.

I floated on my back for a while, looking up at a sky that had gone from blue to that specific shade of near-green that happens at dusk over the Mediterranean, and felt, briefly, the particular freedom of having no interface to manage. No screen. No signal. No metric by which my presence in the water could be optimized.

The sea does not know that I run a startup. It does not care about my retention numbers or my churn rate or whether the Q2 roadmap will ship on time. It is simply there, and it has been there for longer than any problem I have ever had, and it will be there after every solution I have ever built has been deprecated.

I found this, surprisingly, not humbling but clarifying.

The best products I have built — the ones that lasted, the ones that users actually loved — were the ones where I stopped trying to solve everything and started asking: what does this person actually need, right now, in this moment, before I showed up? The answer is usually simpler than the architecture I had already designed. It is usually something the water already knew.

I drove back to Tunis in the early morning, the coast road still empty, the sea on my right turning pink in the first light. I had not solved anything. I had not produced a document or a deliverable or a strategic insight formatted for a slide deck.

I had simply been in a place that was older than my problems, and let it do what old places do: remind you that most urgency is invented, and most silence is not empty.

Mohamed Bliwa is the CTO and co-founder of Syla, an eSIM platform based in Tunis. He writes about cities, technology, and human systems.