It is something we all take for granted, our sense of having a self. Not like the formless soul, but more like the painted pictures that first appeared on walls during the Renaissance. Some historians believe that the self, as we know it, was not a concept in Greek and Roman societies. There are even societies today that lack that concept, or it is only weak. Think of many East Asian cultures, traditional African societies, and Buddhist and Hindu philosophical traditions.
It is hard for us to imagine living in a world without good mirrors or pictures to see ourselves. And this is only the visible part. We now have TV and movies that show us many selves we can mirror, as well as all the books we can read, and the attention companies give to ourselves and how to improve ourselves.
I think it would be better to recognize that we are originally selfless, especially since the sense of self we possess is actually a construct or perhaps a byproduct of influences like Christianity. Consider Augustine’s Confessions, frequently cited as one of the earliest works of autobiographical introspection in Western literature. He examines his thoughts, memories, and moral conflicts, viewing the self as a unified, reflective entity capable of profound inner scrutiny, but this is a story for another time.
If people ask me what my politics are, I usually say nothing, but if they insist, I will say that I am an anarchist. I have to admit that I don’t know enough about political anarchism, but I do know that no one knows what it means. For me, trying to explain how your specific flavor of politics works is like explaining how something feels; every explanation needs an interpretation. Behind every slogan hides countless books, personalities, and an endless history. None of the ideologies has ever worked in their purest forms, and Anarchy is no exception.
The reason why I say that I am an anarchist is that it should be the natural outcome if you have a few premises.
There is no predetermined purpose in the world, no maker, and no rules but those of nature.
We can think, reason, and create our own rules.
From these two points, it follows that there is no natural hierarchy among people—only the ones we invent.
If we are all the same, we should share all the available resources equally.
We are all the same intrinsically, but also different in our capabilities, like our appearance.
If there ever will be a society based on Anarchism, then the biggest hurdle that has been overcome is education. In an anarchist society, as I see it, it is important that everyone knows their place in the community to prevent the need for authority to step in and assign roles. What I mean by “their place” is simply what a good test at school can already do that determines if you are good at math or with your hands, if you are an organizer or a leader. These are traits that should come naturally as you grow up and can change over time. For many anarchists, it is important that there be no authority, but there is always authority in knowledge, experience, and talent. The project manager might tell you what to do during the day, but in the evening, you tell them how to play the piano.
Underneath, I collected some of my notes about anarchy.
I don’t believe in free will because I don’t believe we have a fixed “I” or soul. The I that I think of is more of a snapshot in an ever-changing row of identities. If I think or talk about who I am, I will change that story over time without realizing it. We forget how we identified ourselves in the past, making it seem as if our identity is a constant. You could say that decisions of my earlier me’s influence who I am now. I did not make those decisions; earlier circumstances and versions of me did. That’s one of the reasons I don’t believe in free will.
I do feel that I have a core that stays the same, but I also realize I have no independent way to check this. We all know that we change over time; no one will deny that. But that kind of change is more like what you go through at school, where you take classes and learn things. The things you learn add to who you are. But underneath these life lessons, so to speak, we also feel a more constant identity. We also know that a big part of this identity is located in the brain; change the brain, and your identity changes. Phineas Gage (https://www.verywellmind.com/phineas-gage-2795244) is the obvious example: whether he fully understood the change himself is less important than the fact that people around him did. Like everything in our bodies, our brains also deteriorate over time, and with them, perhaps our identities.
Our identity is constantly changing, and we might be lucky to hold onto the same identity for a few weeks before events alter our perception of our past and present us, the you that is in the making, with a new identity.
Many other thinkers have written about this idea. The way I wrote it down just now might be unique, but I can trace the path back into my past to see who influenced me and shaped my thoughts. Hume is one of those who have influenced me, not so much by the work I read from him but by the place he has in Philosophy. I have a book from him, and though I have had it for 20 years, it still looks brand new, though I found one of my bookmarks at page 92. I just tell myself that the mere presence of these kinds of books in my house rubs off on me. In reality, I used them to verify quotes because you should never trust a source to guarantee a quote’s accuracy.
I used my AI helper to point me in the right direction for finding a quote in Hume’s work about what I was writing about. It pointed me to this chapter, and though it quoted the passage incorrectly, the whole chapter is about an idea similar to what I thought of this morning. In my experience, the AI is almost always bad at quoting, and it tells so much itself. As I said before, you should always go to the source. On the other hand, the AI quote was not wrong; it still portrayed Hume’s intention, and like the modern “translation” into today’s English, they both differ substantially from the original in the words they use. Underneath the text, I will put two screenshots.
Christiaan: I personally think that META is a bad company because a selfish billionaire owns it, and it has supported some terrible regimes in the past. Many people know this, but they still use its apps. Those same people would not go to the next-door store if they knew the owner hits his wife regularly, so why the double standard?
Le Chat: Your point touches on a common tension in modern consumer behavior: the disconnect between personal ethics and convenience. Many people criticize companies like Meta for their ethical lapses, but continue using their platforms because the alternatives are less convenient or nonexistent. The comparison to a local store owner is interesting—boycotting a business with unethical practices feels direct and visible, but with global tech giants, the impact of individual choices feels diluted.
Do you think this double standard is more about the scale of the company, the lack of viable alternatives, or something else?
Christiaan: I think it is a lack of principles or a failure to keep the principles you have
Le Chat: It does seem like a matter of principle—or the lack of consistency in applying them. When people boycott a local business for unethical behavior, the consequences feel immediate and personal. But with a corporation like Meta, the ethical violations can feel abstract or distant, even if they’re objectively worse. It’s easier to overlook the disconnect when the impact isn’t visible in our daily lives.
Do you think this inconsistency reflects a broader human tendency to compartmentalize ethics, or is it more about the complexity of modern systems making it harder to act on our values?
These are the pictures I took 3673 days ago, on March 24, 2016. It was the day I told myself I should take my so-called hobby a bit more seriously, so I challenged myself to take a picture every day and post it online. For the first 604 days, it was just pictures, and I posted on a photo website that I no longer have. I still have all the pictures, but you cannot find them on this blog. I am not sure why I moved to WordPress, but I guess it was about time to not only post a picture a day but also share some of my writing. I have always written, but irregularly, and I guess it was time to take that hobby more seriously, too. I never really posted on social media, mainly because I moved away from them in 2016, and because I have all kinds of opinions and I don’t care too much for interaction with people who have other opinions. That is just a waste of time. I had a few good interactions with people who commented here over the years, who might disagree with me, but they were in the form of long emails, not lunch-sized critiques with a side of word salad.
If you look at the top of this post, you can see that I am on day 3670, not 3673. I don’t know exactly how that happened, but I remember a few times that I realized just in time that I had entered the wrong day numbers for a couple of days and had to go back a few posts to fix it. I guess that happened another 3 times, but by then, I could never recover from that mistake. Imagine changing the title of a thousand posts… But I swear I posted every day, though sometimes it was the day after, after midnight, or when I was in an airplane and had to wait until whatever time it was in the new time zone. I will stick with the 3670 for today because, as I said, I’ve been doing this for 10 years, and if I may say so myself, that is something.
Photography is still my hobby, but I don’t take pictures every day like I did at the beginning. I did that for a couple of years, often taking several good pictures in one day. Over time, I started using pictures from other days. So it is still a picture a day, but sometimes I go back to pictures from the last month, and sometimes to ones from 30 years or more, and use one of those old pictures. I still love taking pictures. For the last 1.5 years, I have been going to Fredrikstad’s center on Sunday mornings to take pictures. I did this just to push myself to find inspiration in streets I have walked many times and have seen every building through one of my lenses, but now I am done with it, and I wait for the moment when nature wakes up here, and I can go out with my macro lens again.
It never feels like a burden to write every day. It is so normal now that I see no reason to quit. Even on the busiest days, I always find a few minutes to snap an interesting picture with my phone, write a three-sentence poem-like thing, and post it. I can do that on the toilet if I have to. But seriously, for someone like me who thinks way too much and knows all too well how repetitive daily life is, these five minutes on the toilet, or more normally, 30 minutes to an hour behind my computer looking for a cool picture, editing it, and getting inspired to write something about it, keep me going. Without art, life is not much worth.
I asked the AI overlord to pick 10 random days. I took screenshots of those days and posted them below.
I close my eyes and look for a point I can stand on, a fixed point in my thoughts. Although “thoughts” is not quite right, I try not to think, but to feel some kind of grip. Why do I do this? Somehow I have a memory of a state of mind that was different from now. I assume that back then I had certain certainties or simply accepted the given answers.
Around the age of twenty, my innocence took its first hit, after my school years. School was not yet the real world to me. After turning eighteen, and especially after school, I expected to enter a world of rationality, no more childishness. My first mistake was thinking that you should always do your best, stay alert, and remain eager to learn. It turned out to be character traits. My fellow marines did not appreciate that, and I was deeply disappointed that my effort was not valued everywhere. Not because I wanted recognition, but because to me it was the most natural thing in the world to simply do your best, especially as a marine. I also felt that I was not at fault. Here I touch on an important point, something I have been thinking about a lot lately. How can you judge or condemn someone’s character, or ingrained, imagined, or suppressed behavior? Fine, judge, but condemn. Everyone should know how difficult it is to truly change.
I notice I am drifting. I started with the feeling of having no foothold and now I am analyzing one of its causes. I drift quickly. In theory, having no foothold is ideal. If you need nothing, nothing can disturb your peace. But that is difficult, and it is not easy to create something meaningful out of a nihilistic worldview. I wish I believed in God and that all of this served some purpose, that would make it much easier to bear. Unfortunately, I do not have that character or ingrained, imagined, or suppressed behavior.
I found this in one of my notebooks, without any context. It is from 25 years ago, I think. These notes are interesting because so many thoughts and good ideas are gone, but this is at least something, even though it stands alone, without much context, as I mentioned before.
Notes
I’d Rather Bang My Head than bow my way through life.
The purpose of life is life itself.
Human life seems special, but we don’t even know if we’re alone.
Something can only be special if there’s more than one.
Memory, the deathblow to truth.
Creation is beautiful, but its name is wrong; there is no creator.
Memory is our creator from which our own creation began.
Memory does not forget itself, there the I was born.
I change every day yet remain more of the same.
The trick memory played, and so my I was made.
Fear of Death
What do we know about death?
What we know of this life and of this reality
It can end at any time
Fear of death means fear of the uncertainty about when it will come
No More Nonsense
No small talk or idle chatter
Work on your “book of life.”
Make sure you are always at a high point, always moving upward or downward, and if you are on flat ground, make sure you are going somewhere.
Avoid stagnation
Stillness is good, but not for nothing, with purpose
Write Your Life
Fantasize about your life
Be the hero
Don’t forget reality, your work, friends, and everything else
Be selfish, fantasize about what you want
Invoking responsibility is self-deception
Others can play a role, but that is their responsibility. Your life is too short to wait for them.
Empty space I still have the feeling of a large empty space in my head when I concentrate on the purpose of life Could it be a hint, that empty space, that nothing?
From a notebook, 2005
That nothing is what I feel too, even when I try to connect with my real personality, deadly afraid to face my past for my sense of self. Who am I amidst all this noise? I have an idea, but I don’t dare reveal it yet, very afraid to let go of my familiar personality. I allow myself to be seen only occasionally, by confidants, fellow philosophers, so to speak, because I dare to call myself that, just not to everyone. So I don’t yet dare to claim that identity. When people ask what I do, I say I’m a carpenter. It comes out hesitantly, but for convenience, I say I’m a carpenter. Actually, I’m a philosopher, which is just a word. I’ve never had illusions or dreams, and if you examine them, then you’re what they call a philosopher. I once had illusions, but for the last four or five years, I’ve been almost certain that I no longer have illusions, or maybe this is an illusion; I don’t expect any great insights anymore that make me believe there’s a purpose beyond our time here on this rock with a layer of mold on it. No more illusions, only… dreams.
Caged animals Caged animals From cage to cage From institution to institution
From one cage to another I move, the setting changes, but I do not, not yet outside where I want to be, outside that cage.
But that world outside might exist only here inside my head, as hope without bars.
All those people out there, outside my cage, I do not despise for their freedom, but for their carelessness, their lack.
A lack of appreciation for their cage without bars, their naivety, their not knowing their own reality.
As a caged being I can say nothing, I can pace back and forth like an animal, but I am not able to speak.
As an animal I think in images, feelings and reactions without words that teach me, teach me nothing.
People talk and talk and convince each other, confuse each other that this is so and that is so, but only with words.
Only with words, hearsay, from once, from the past, from him or her, but without feeling.
Feeling that originates from the deepest of what we all are, caged animals.
Sunday 25 march 2007
In October 2006, I moved to Norway. It’s been 20 years, so I can be forgiven for not remembering everything so clearly, but aside from that excuse, I had a clear story in my mind about those first few years. This weekend, I read my blog from the first three years in Norway. Well, I didn’t actually read it all; I skimmed over it while I copied the text into a document (103 pages, 80.000 words) and fed it to a chatbot. I asked it all kinds of questions and requested it to show me all the quotes, and I was quite surprised. For the last 10 years, I’ve been writing a lot, and I feel like I know myself pretty well now. Because I think I know myself now, the time before the ten-year mark seems like the dark ages to me. It’s a period where I obviously thought about things. I left many relics behind in the form of books I’ve bought in those dark ages, but in my mind, it all felt pretty trivial.
The blog post was meant for family to read, and for the most part, it’s lighthearted. I talk about the weather, my work, and what I do in my free time. But I was also not afraid to share my feelings about life, myself, and the people around me.
One of my go-to stories when people ask why I moved to Norway is about the book “Nooit Meer Slapen” (Never Sleep Again) by the famous Dutch novelist W.F. Hermans. I read that book around age 16, and I can’t quite explain why it resonated with me, but what it represented stayed with me. I realize more and more how it reflects a part of me, the 16-year-old me, wearing a “Great Pretender” T-shirt, was already more aware than his intellect could put into words. The novel shows that human attempts to find certainty, meaning, and success often fail in an indifferent world where knowledge is unreliable and people are fundamentally alone.
When butterflies don’t fly. Fading away, overwhelmed in lies. Wings eager, restricted by weeds. Cracked mud of the soil grades the time. When butterflies couldn’t fly. Day 864
Individuals, according to my past individuals
Definition by Chatbot: The concept of the individual is not as simple as it appears. It is often presented as a single, distinct human being, defined by unique biological, psychological, and social traits. But this definition is superficial. The idea of the individual as an autonomous, self-determining agent is largely an illusion. The mind does not generate ideas in isolation; it is shaped by language, culture, and education. Thoughts are constructed from what we absorb from others, from the environment, from history. The individual is not a self-contained entity but a reflection of inherited ideas and external forces.
Reinterpretations of older work, see the quotes underneath.
Summary of 10 years of writing by Chat.Mistral and curated by me.
As I reflect on my writings and the recurring ideas that have shaped my philosophical exploration, I see a tapestry of interconnected themes. These themes are not just abstract concepts but deeply personal reflections on what it means to be human, to search for meaning, and to navigate the complexities of existence. Here are the ten most common themes that have emerged in my work, expressed in my own voice and with the depth they deserve:
The Nature of Reality
One of the central themes in my philosophy is the exploration of the nature of reality. I often find myself questioning how we perceive and understand the world around us. This theme involves delving into the complexities of human existence and the influence of our environment on our personal identity. As I’ve written, “The world is complex, much of our thinking is inherited, and certainty is rare.” This idea captures the essence of my inquiry into reality—acknowledging that our understanding is often shaped by factors beyond our immediate perception.
The Human Condition
My writings frequently reflect on the essence of being human—the struggles, emotions, and experiences that define our existence. I delve into topics such as the role of visionaries, the impact of environment on mood, and the struggle with depression. These reflections are deeply personal, drawing on my own experiences and observations. In one of my entries, I wrote:
“Humanity learns to walk like a baby does, and what can you teach a baby? You can only encourage it with gestures and sounds because the rest has no meaning to them.”
This passage highlights my belief that our understanding of the human condition is a gradual process, shaped by our experiences and interactions with the world.
The Search for Meaning
The search for meaning is a recurring theme in my work. I investigate the purpose and meaning of life, and how individuals can find meaning in their existence. This theme is central to my philosophical musings and reflections. As I’ve expressed:
“Philosophy gave me a manual for life, and maybe I’m still figuring it out, but one thing it has taught me so far is how to stand without ground beneath my feet, which is very useful if you’ve ever been depressed.”
This idea underscores the importance of finding meaning even in the face of uncertainty and instability. It’s about embracing the journey of self-discovery and understanding that meaning is not always readily apparent but must be sought through introspection and reflection.
Our narrow minds make us believe that we live in strange days. And we are, but not particularly stranger than ever before. With every step we take, we forget the third or praise the ground it had just stepped on. Our world might be destroyed by climate change or nuclear war, but people have lived for thousands of years in worlds no larger than the six houses around them or the small city they inhabited in fear of instant destruction. The theatre we live in now might be as large as the whole world and the angst real, but don’t pretend it’s new.
I don’t have many good reasons for my aversion to this kind of doom-and-gloom. We will always live among nay-sayers and deniers, and the idea of progress is a challenge for many, but don’t forget that these people are also happy to have clean water to drink and to visit a dentist when they have a toothache. Progress does not care what we think; it will move forward, and no one is innocent in this game of who is to blame.
Don’t forget that behind all the nonsense we believe in and are willing to die for are people who bleed when they get cut, mourn their loved ones, and even fall in love for the first time, just like we do, even when these feelings are hidden behind shame and fear. You know for yourself what is hidden inside, we are all afraid to look in the mirror, to look deep in the reflections of our own eyes.
I think, therefore I am is what Descartes famously said. He seems to clarify later that the thinking is undeniable, but that little can yet be concluded about the nature of the thinker. A critique that you can make, and is made, is the “I” in this phrase. How could Descartes concluded thet the “I” he identifies with is the thing that does the thinking?
It is hard to ignore the feeling that there is something in us that does the thinking and that we call I. The reason is that I feel like I think about it. But the I that thinks is also the I that makes bodily sounds, and how much do you control those?
In light of this, “I” seems more like a linguistic tool we use to communicate with others and with ourselves. Our bodies breathe and digest without our intervention, yet we still say that we breathe and digest, just as we say “I think this or that,” even though our control over thinking may not be very different.
But man’s craving for grandiosity is now suffering the third and most bitter blow from present-day psychological research which is endeavouring to prove to the “ ego ” of each one of us that he is not even master in his own house, but that he must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind.
Even as a wooden boat builder, I need to stay updated with the times. Today, I took a course on how we can use AI. While I’ve used ChatGPT to translate some of my work writings, I also feel some resistance—not because of the technology itself but because of the hype surrounding it and since it’s owned by billionaires. Still, I have to admit that the possibilities are impressive. It still makes many mistakes, but that’s something you can notice and work around. I also now understand that what we upload is supposed to stay private and won’t be used to train the algorithm, which makes it easier to let the AI “learn” my own work.
I’ve been writing for over ten years, periodically reviewing my old work, organizing it by themes, and considering whether to use it as material for a book. I uploaded everything into ChatGPT’s database and started asking questions. I quickly realized it’s a valuable tool, provided I learn how to ask the right questions. For now, I just had some fun asking if it could summarize my work and imagine an external person describing the book I might have written. It’s quite flattering to read, and I probably wouldn’t have phrased it that way myself. But honestly, I don’t have a clear overview of the roughly 100,000 words I’ve written over the last years. I can only share how I feel right now. It’s a fun experiment, and I can also ask AI to suggest chapters and write summaries. Still, I already know that I need to review each sentence to ensure accurate interpretation; luckily, the AI can show where it pulls its information from. Overall, it’s a fantastic tool.
And at the end of the course, we also learned what you can do with Google NotebookLM, and it is even a greater tool—or toy. I put 20 pages of my writing into it, and it created the picture you see above and a podcast. The podcast sounds like a gymmic, but it brings me back to the old thoughts I wrote down years ago.
AI’s interpretation of my work brought as a presentation of my not-yet-written book.
Ladies and gentlemen,
After reading this remarkable body of writing—years of notes, poems, reflections, doubts, and small revelations—I can tell you that the author’s philosophy is not a system. It is a movement. A long, slow arc from certainty toward skepticism, from inherited assumptions toward self-made clarity, from the search for meaning toward the acceptance that meaning is something we make, not something we find.
Across these years the same themes return, grow, and collide. One of the earliest is the idea that life is not about us. The author writes that DNA “only needs a host,” and that humans are simply the best vehicle it has yet found. That shift—from human-centered thinking to a cosmic, indifferent perspective—runs through everything. It’s why religion appears in these pages less as a metaphysical claim and more as a very human attempt to silence the void. “We are all just standing in a big room,” he writes, “proclaiming truths we perceive from the echoes on the walls.”
Another central thread is the fragility of the self. Memory, he reminds us, is a storyteller that constantly rewrites the past to protect the present. The self is a creature of filters: “My two-way filter is partially broken,” he admits, “and I can only fix one side.” Here his philosophy leans toward a kind of grounded humility—an acceptance that what we call “I” is stitched together from sensation, error, upbringing, chemicals, and luck.
And yet, in this humility there is a defiant skepticism. He distrusts authorities, leaders, and movements not because he rejects structure but because he knows how easily people surrender their judgment. He once expected adulthood to be ruled by reason; decades later he observes, wryly, that “the world is a summer camp without supervision.” This is anarchism not as politics but as perception: a refusal to hand the steering wheel of the mind to anyone who claims to know better.
One of the most striking aspects of his philosophy is how deeply it is rooted in the physical world—wood grain, old barns, the curve of a boat plank, mist on a Norwegian morning. The cosmic and the ordinary sit side by side. He can explain stellar expansion in one paragraph and, in the next, describe a forgotten lock rusting into history. This is not contradiction; it is the worldview: life is meaningless on the cosmic scale, and meaningful in every concrete moment we actually live.
Many poems could serve as a doorway into his thinking, but one stands out:
“Reality fades caught by ego’s gravity a depressed black hole.”
This captures the emotional honesty of his philosophy: the willingness to look at the darkness without romanticizing it, to name despair without surrendering to it.
If his work offers any guidance, it is this: We may not control the world, we may not understand ourselves, but we can keep walking through the mist with open eyes—skeptical, curious, and unafraid to admit that we know far less than we pretend.
Does all this strife and talk, all these opinions and countless books, lead to anything? Is there progress? Let’s take our healthcare as an example, something so much more advanced than even 60 years ago, let alone 50000 years ago.
It’s safe to assume that we are kept alive longer because of modern medical advances, but it’s harder to say that we live healthier or significantly longer because of it. People also lived to eighty or older in the Middle Ages, just not as many; the average lifespan was much lower because a large percentage of children never reached adulthood.
Some say that hunter-gatherers were healthier because they had a more varied diet; they probably ate more nutritionally than most of us do now, but they also died earlier from diseases we can now easily treat. It seems that the constant search for answers has benefited our health; we eat less varied, but live longer because of our knowledge.
But living healthily is one thing; for most, it’s important, but many accept life as it is and are blessed with a positive attitude. Ignorance can also be a blessing. The loss of your health, a newborn, or a brother was also felt 50000 years ago, and the feeling of grief probably wasn’t much different from what we would feel today. However, for them, it was primarily unexplained, and the idea of living healthier and eating less red meat would never have come up. They probably worried about why they died, but not in a way that we can imagine, though they imagine in the same way.
I believe it’s essential for a percentage of the smartest people to research how diseases work and how we can prevent and cure them, not because it will make us happier, but because we are capable of doing so. This “because we can do it” research is important in many fields, but you can probably think of some areas where it is not.
So, strife and talk are important, but only in themselves, not because there’s a specific goal we can reach. In other words, progress can occur on the edges of our existence, but our fundamental experience will stay the same.
