Feliks Karić
Bio
50+, still refusing to grow up. I write daily, record music no one listens to, and loiter on film sets. I cook & train like a pro, yet my belly remains a loyal fan. Seen a lot, learned little, just a kid with older knees and no plan.
Stories (15)
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Tried to Love "The Secret Agent" (2025)- But it Almost Broke Me
I wanted to love it. I really did. I sat down with the lights dimmed, ready to be transported to 1970s Recife, ready for the "slow-burn" brilliance that everyone from Cannes to the Oscars had been whispering about. But two hours in, something happened that rarely happens to me as a cinephile: I felt a heavy, physical exhaustion. I had to hit pause. I had to walk away.
By Feliks Karić7 days ago in Critique
The Silk and the Shrapnel
History is a lazy and superficial artist. It loves straight lines, clear-cut motives, and people who fit neatly into the boxes someone else marked with a thick Sharpie a long time ago. In those boxes, a warrior is a stone-carved archetype: someone who smells of cheap tobacco, wears a low-slung baseball cap, and hasn't taken off a faded camo jacket in the decades since the last howitzers went silent in the distance. There is this unspoken, almost religious dictate that trauma must be visible, abrasive, and unkempt. If you don’t look broken on the outside, the world doesn’t believe you’ve ever seen the abyss on the inside. Society demands that your sacrifice be displayed like an exhibit in a museum of defeat, rather than your triumph in the form of elegance.
By Feliks Karić28 days ago in Fiction
The 30 Percent Armor
My bathroom is a minefield I know by heart. Every tile under my bare feet has its own temperature, every bottle on the shelf its own weight and texture. This is my sanctuary, my little staging ground for practicing “normal” before I step out and put on the mask I’ve spent years carving. This morning is particularly rough. The fog in my left eye—the one that checked out years ago, a late-coming bill from a war injury that finally came due—has started bleeding into the right. A recent ablation did its job, but it left the world looking like a water-damaged oil painting. I see about thirty percent of reality. The other seventy? I fill that in with memory, gut instinct, and pure, raw spite.
By Feliks Karić30 days ago in Fiction
The Weight of a Touch: Why My best Training Equipment Isn't made of Iron
The Weight of a Touch: Why My Best Training Equipment Isn't Made of Iron The air in a commercial gym is thick with more than just the smell of rubber mats and recycled oxygen. If you stop moving for a second and just observe, you’ll feel it—a heavy, invisible fog of human ambition, deep-seated anxiety, and the restless energy of people trying to outrun their own shadows. Most personal trainers see this environment as a simple workspace where calories are burned and muscles are built. But for me, the gym floor is a sanctuary where two souls meet in a very raw, vulnerable state. And because of what I’ve survived, I refuse to walk onto that floor without a very specific kind of protection.
By Feliks Karićabout a month ago in Longevity
Why I'm Using Secret Military Survival Rituals to Fix Burned-Out CEO's
The Frequency of Survival: Why I Don’t Care About Your Squat PR I’m an anti-talent for business. Let’s just start there. I don’t have a marketing funnel, my Instagram is a disaster, and for years, my "price list" was basically whatever my gut told me was right in the moment. If you’d told me thirty years ago, while I was clutching a rifle in a frozen Croatian trench, that I’d spend my fifties gently rubbing the forehead of some high-powered executive who’s on the verge of tears from exhaustion. I’d have thought you were shell-shocked.
By Feliks Karićabout a month ago in Viva
The Scent of Empathy: What the Front Lines Taught Me About you Workout
The Battlefield You Don’t See You’d think that after being a member of the 1st Guards Brigade "Tigers" during the Croatian War of Independence, I’d be the kind of trainer who screams in your face until you puke. You’d expect a drill sergeant in camo pants, barking about "no pain, no gain" and "weakness leaving the body."
By Feliks Karićabout a month ago in Longevity
The No-Exercise Cholesterol Hack: How I Ate My Way Out of a Medical Mess
I’ve spent most of my life as an athlete and a soldier, which means I’m used to treating my body like a machine. In that world, you don’t ask how the engine feels; you just put the fuel in and demand results. But hit fifty, throw in a few major surgeries, and suddenly that machine starts looking more like a rusty tractor.
By Feliks Karićabout a month ago in Longevity
My Synth and My Friend, DJ Bruno
Why I’m not a musician, I’m just a guy trying to stay sane in a loud world I have a friend named Bruno. He’s an old sea wolf of the DJ world—the kind of guy who lived through the golden era of Italian House music when everything felt like a warm hug.
By Feliks Karić2 months ago in Confessions
The Friday Ritual
The routine was a loop, the same silent ceremony every Friday at 7:00 PM sharp. It had been going on for three long years. Marko would stand at the heavy oak table, his shoulders tight, and begin to slice the sourdough. Skritch. Skritch. The sound of the blade biting through the hard crust was the only clock that ticked in that house. He cut each slice with the focus of a surgeon, terrified that if a single crumb fell outside some imaginary line on the dark wood, the fragile peace he’d spent years building would just snap.
By Feliks Karić2 months ago in Fiction
Slippers vs. Statues: Melania's Untold Human Story(Part.3)
In this series, I’ve explored Melania Trump through a lens Hollywood doesn’t have: the lens of a neighbor. I was born in 1973 in Croatia, just thirty miles from where she grew up in Sevnica, Slovenia. I’ve written about her "Stone Face" as a reflex of Balkan Survival Mode and how her marriage to Donald reflects the "Grč"—that deep-seated Balkan muscle spasm of seeking security in a cold patriarch.
By Feliks Karić2 months ago in Critique
