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Day 2459, I don’t know if I make it to the end.

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Let’s say that you start working when you are eighteen and stop working when you are seventy; then, you have fifty-two years of work ahead or past you, or you are somewhere in between. Fifty-two years times fifty-two weeks is two thousand seven hundred and four weeks of work in an average lifetime. Where I live, we all have roughly five weeks of vacation, so in fifty-two years, that is two-hundred sixty weeks of vacation. If you take that of two thousand seven hundred and four weeks, you end up with two thousand four hundred forty-four weeks of work. Two thousand four hundred forty-four weeks of work times seven days is seventeen thousand one hundred and eight days. Divide seventeen thousand one hundred and eight by seven and multiply that by five; you then have twelve thousand two hundred and twenty days of actual work, without the two days weekend. Well, work… we are also sometimes sick, and though I couldn’t find good statistics for a worldwide average number, I will use five days each year, so that is two-hundred sixty days in fifty-two years of working. So twelve thousand two hundred and twenty days minus two-hundred sixty is eleven thousand nine hundred and sixty days of work. We don’t work twenty-four hours in a day but eight (to make it easy, for many years, I have worked seven and a half hours a day). So eleven thousand nine hundred and sixty days times eight hours is ninety-five thousand six hundred and eighty hours or five million seven hundred forty thousand and eight hundred minutes as in three hundred forty-four million four hundred and forty-eight thousand seconds. During that time, my heart has beaten four hundred thirty million and five hundred sixty thousand times, and my body made three trillion nine hundred eighty-six billion six hundred sixty-six million six hundred sixty-six thousand six hundred sixty-six and six hundred sixty-seven thousandths red blood cells, and not to mention the fifteen billion nine hundred forty-six million six hundred sixty-six thousand six hundred sixty-six and sixty-six thousand six hundred sixty-seven hundred-thousandths epidermal skin cells.

Day 2458, yes.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

The Gay Science
Book one

45 Epicurus. Yes, I am proud to experience Epicurus’ character in a way unlike perhaps anyone else and to enjoy, in everything I hear and read of him, the happiness of the afternoon of antiquity: I see his eye gaze at a wide whitish sea, across shoreline rocks bathed in the sun, as large and small creatures play in its light, secure and calm like the light and his eye itself. Only someone who is continually suffering could invent such happiness – the happiness of an eye before which the sea of existence has grown still and which now cannot get enough of seeing the surface and this colourful, tender, quivering skin of the sea: never before has voluptuousness been so modest.

Day 2456, brain fart.

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For fifteen years now, I have lived in a country other than the one I grew up. I moved there to get away from a society I started to dislike more and more. In short, I worked in a few non-western countries and realized that we have very little to complain about what we have and can achieve in life; back home I got the feeling that a lot of people don’t realize that.

I moved to this other country, and although I am a good citizen (I pay my taxes), I don’t integrate that well and don’t follow the local news and politics. I just want to live and work with these people without knowing what they stand for within these artificial borders and societies. People are much easier to deal with if they don’t bring their attitude with them and if you can leave your attitude safely at home.

I do follow the news from around the world, but deleting news apps from my phone works like a volume button. When they are all gone from my phone, it is silent. I still go to my work, drive through the snow, go shopping and live my life without all the stress of what’s happening in the world. I know that sticking your head in the ground is not a solution, but if others can replicate my experience, I will propose that, well… propose is a big word, I just had a brain fart while driving through that snowstorm today, and the idea was that if most people from one country just move over to the next country and start living their life without angering themselves or their new hosts the world would slowly become a better place. But then I realized that many people still have nationalistic feelings, and though childish, it’s hard to ignore.

Day 2447, too much.

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I drive an electric car to make up for the first car I ever owned. It was a car driven for many years by the marines stationed in Curacao, and now it was my time. It had no badges or other markings that I remember, so I don’t know what it was. I do know it had a 5.7 Liter v8, and that was something. It being my first car, I had to learn a lot, like the fact that it most of the time, only runs on 5 or 6 cylinders and that having a few bottles of water and oil was a necessity. It used a lot of oil and not only for the engine but also the power steering; having a heavy v8 right above the wheels and no power steering is no fun, I can tell you.

One adventure I still remember was when I ran out of fuel in the middle of nowhere. It was still in the time when we had no mobile phones, so I looked around for a vessel and picked up a 2L cola bottle, and started walking. After a while, I reached a bus stop, waited for the bus, and got out at the first petrol station I saw. I filled the cola bottle and reversed the trip back to the car, which I reached a few hours later. I filled it up with the 2l of gasoline I had and started driving… for, let’s say, 6 kilometers. That was something I hadn’t realized before; the car used 3 liters of fuel for every kilometer it drove, and for the Americans, that is seven mpg. That is and was a ridiculous amount, and my punishment was that I had to do the whole ritual of walking and taking a bus again, but this time I bought a jerrycan.

After this car had finally done enough in its life, I bought a more sensible car for the remainder of my stay. Back in the Netherlands, I never owned a car, there is enough public transportation, and I also had motorcycles; they were not as friendly for the environment, but at least I was more fuel efficient.

I now drive an electric car for almost six years, not only to make up but also because it drives so much better. I still feel guilty if I drive a “normal” car, knowing so clearly that I once carried the fuel that so rapidly disappeared in the air we breathe.

Day 2446, grey?

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Beyond good and evil

213. It is difficult to learn what a philosopher is, because it cannot be taught: you have to “know” by experience, – or you should be proud that you do not know it at all. But nowadays everyone talks about things that they cannot experience, and most especially (and most terribly) when it comes to philosophers and philosophical matters. Hardly anyone knows about them or is allowed to know, and all popular opinions about them are false. So, for instance, the genuinely philosophical compatibility between a bold and lively spirituality that runs along at a presto, and a dialectical rigor and necessity that does not take a single false step – this is an experience most thinkers and scholars would find unfamiliar and, if someone were to mention it, unbelievable. They think of every necessity as a need, a painstaking having-to-follow and being-forced; and they consider thinking itself as something slow and sluggish, almost a toil and often enough “worth the sweat of the noble.” Not in their wildest dreams would they think of it as light, divine, and closely related to dance and high spirits! “Thinking” and “treating an issue seriously,” “with gravity” – these belong together, according to most thinkers and scholars: that is the only way they have “experienced” it –…