My thoughts

Day 3481, is it possible.

anarchism, Daily picture, My thoughts

Is it possible to organize a society on anarchist principles now? My short answer is no, and my long answer in short is maybe in a future far, far away. I enjoy reading about Anarchism and the ideas about it. So what is the problem? I believe that in an Anarchist society, it should be possible to have no locks, no money, and no police. Can you imagine that now? Many anarchists believe that the material possessions we have now have no real value, and that no one should want them from you because they have for themselves all they really need. An Anarchist knows that the value is made up and created over time; we made it all up. 

As an Anarchist, living in a society that follows Anarchistic ideas demands a lot of discipline and restraint. It has to be clear to such an individual that life is limited and without purpose besides the beauty we can clearly see and produce. This beauty is as limited as our own lives, but we can imagine that the reason we can think, see, listen, and create is simply to do these things. The stars can guide our path and tell us what to do, or we launch the Hubble telescope into an orbit around the Earth and enjoy the spectacle without looking for a meaning in it. No star is there for you.

If you cannot live solely on the beauty of your own art, your mind will seek other nourishment. In most societies around the world, the dishes that are served for the hungry are traditional, with recipes from the past or given by new masters. Is it the fault of the hungry that they cannot create? In our current society, that is most certainly not the case because even if you have hidden talents, very little that motivates us, motivates us to create. Most people have learned to consume not only what we can easily throw away, but also the thoughts we are supposed to think. Creation is dangerous, says the dictator, because it is incapable of doing so.

And who, besides some artists, writers, philosophers, and all those quiet people sitting in the corner, really believe that life is not much more than art and creating art? Art is saying what can’t be said and hoping it finds an ear. We can only hope when we meet, when looking into each other’s eyes, that we both know this…truth?

Day 3476, memories in disguise.

Daily picture, My thoughts, Poetry

This picture, which I took, represents a kind of memory for me. What I mean by that is that I don’t remember being there, but it is still an important part of my memories. I remember vaguely the wooden floor and the closeness to the skulls, but…I do remember that these skulls have hunted me in my dreams a couple of times in the past. My memories of being truly there and the even stronger emotions I felt in my dreams are mixed, so the wooden floor I remember might as well not be true; maybe I took this picture from a car when we were on patrol, driving by.

Another thing that is related to this monument in Cambodia, a memorial in remembrance of the millions of people killed during the Pol Pot regime, is the fact that it changed my life. To be clear, my life did not alter course after I saw it for the first time; it was just the tiniest seed that was dropped. Having worked as a UN soldier for five months in a country so different from what I was used to that has changed my perspective. It opened my eyes, and I could see a bigger world than just what I was used to. I got interested in history and politics and started studying in that direction. If people ask me why I am so sensitive to what is happening in the world, I will show them this picture. This monument represents that change.

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Day 3474, more memories.

Daily picture, My thoughts

I want to write about my past, and it makes sense to start at the beginning, simply because that’s where it began. The problem is that most of what I remember is a series of loose facts, such as living there, being with those people, having that job, and whether it was enjoyable or not, or something in between. I can remember what my old room looked like, mostly because I have seen that one picture of the room from time to time, it’s just the picture I remember holding in my hands if I’m honest. I actually don’t know what it is to remember in the sense of reliving it in my mind. 

What I know of the time from before I moved out of my parents’ house is almost nothing. I can string together a story, I remember the story of my youth. I can point to the tree I climbed when I was 11, and looking down from that vantage point for the first time feels like it is etched in my memory, like what vertigo feels like whenever I experience it now. I remember feeling vertigo in that tree, and more than 30 years later, when standing on a 10-story-high balcony. I recall many strong emotions, and they are often associated with a specific place. However, the feelings are real, but I have no certainty that the locations are correct. 

After I moved out, the story became richer, perhaps because I had finally started living my own life, and the vacation was over. The steps I took now, I did for the first time on my own; I paid attention to where I was going. However, as I mentioned earlier, I am a skeptic and don’t entirely trust my own memories, except for the basic facts that I have lived in different places, attended various schools, and held other jobs. Later experiences now taint most of the feelings that accompanied them, and my feelings about specific events have also evolved over the years. I also believe that if you are currently experiencing strong emotions, such as a breakup, you should recognize that you are the last one to have an objective assessment of what is happening. It often takes time to acknowledge that the strong feelings were, for the most part, an exaggeration and a reflection of how the world around you expects that you should react, how your background taught you what an appropriate memory should look like.   

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Day 3473, not ever.

Daily picture, My thoughts

Your past is like a painting, one you remember starting, but not ever finishing.

I want to write about my life, not for the three people who visit my blog, but because I have to fill time, and in the hope that piecing it together will bring back lost memories. 

This last point is important to me because I often tire of the stories I tell myself and others about my adventures. They are all interesting, I believe, but I am also afraid that if I repeat them over and over, they will start living their own lives, one little exaggeration building upon another. I care if the stories I tell have some truth in them. 

But why would I doubt my own memories? I’m a sceptic, and as long as I can remember, I have always asked “why” if confronted with statements. Because many answers to why questions contradicted each other, I turned to other sources, and books are a great one. You cannot only read about other people’s ideas in other regions, but also from other times. If you read the literature, it is clear that we humans have a terrible memory. The problem with memories that primarily revolve around our own experiences is that we must be our own judge, and even if others were present and collaborated on our story, we still need to be cautious. One article I read, as an example, was about an experiment conducted by a young psychology student. He interviewed a group of people just after 9/11 and wrote down their experience, where they were, and what they felt. More than a decade later, he interviewed these people again and asked them where they were during that critical time. Several participants in this experiment insisted that their recollections were accurate, despite clearly conflicting with what actually happened in reality and with what they wrote down immediately after the event. They misremembered, but they were also sure they were right. 

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Day 3412, what it looks like.

Daily picture, Day's pictures, My thoughts

I know that there are more people who question life. I read books by people who try to answer at least some of the questions. I watch people on television and the internet who clearly try to do the same, but in real life, it is different. People generally don’t have a title hovering above their heads that cleverly promotes the questions they have and tries to answer. The people you are closest to might give you more insight into what is going on inside, but from my experience, I still have to speculate a lot. I have to admit that I will not open up to a random person, but if they want, they can learn a lot about me from what I have written over the last 20 years. I know that it would be strange if everybody poured their hearts out and started telling you their darkest secrets, but would it not be nice if we could at least admit that we all have questions and insecurities and that shame should not be a brake on going to the next level in your conversations, the level above chitchat. It’s like our naked bodies; we all hide them, though we all know what they look like.

Day 3411, Cogito, ergo sum.

Daily picture, My thoughts

I understand Descartes’ journey to find the things that he, or maybe better said, we can know. I also strive not to speculate, but to stick to what we can know, such as Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.” And it is obvious that we think, regardless of what we believe.   

I thought about this because of what even he, in a different way, will have noticed. I like YouTube, but I don’t care too much for the model or the company that owns it. However, there are a lot of interesting videos to find.  There is, of course, this famous algorithm that serves you what might be interesting for you. This makes it difficult to be critical of what you find on YouTube because we all have a different experience, no feed is the same.  But as long as you know that there is an algorithm and how it roughly works, you can make use of it to find interesting stuff and what hangs around the borders of what you find interesting.

I enjoy watching documentaries, interviews, and video essays about philosophy, psychology, society, and related topics. But most of what I watch is from creators who are sceptical, and they tend to steer away from speculation. Last week, I watched some videos about consciousness, and in some of them, they interviewed individuals who seemed to be experts in a specific subject and stuck to that topic throughout the video.  If I find someone interesting, I will conduct some research to gain an impression of their stance on other subjects. Sometimes, they stray from the norm and come up with the most fantastic ideas on how all of this, in this case, consciousness, works when you watch them being interviewed or portrayed by creators who have a more specific agenda and are less critical. It is, of course, no crime to speculate, but when I then see them in these pseudo-scientific videos about third dimensions and alternate states, I will reach for the ignore button.

These uncritical thinkers are no Descartes, so that’s why I ignore them. Even though Descartes will also venture into areas where he cannot prove that what he says is true, he still has a great mind. With thinkers from his time, it is also harder to blame them for not being too outspoken because blasphemy could literally cost you your head, and they did not have the luxury of all the knowledge we now have about our physical bodies. Descartes is, of course, known for his dualism, which posits that the physical body somehow interacts with the spiritual world, specifically the soul. Scientists have examined the brain and other parts of the body where this connection is formed, but most serious thinkers recognize that there is no soul and such a connection. One of the clues is damage to parts of the brain, which then affects how we think (think also of alcohol, caffeine, and drugs). If there is a soul separated from our physical body, how can this soul then be affected? Damage to the brain is something that can be measured, and its effects are visible in how someone behaves. In this, you also need to theorize on why this is, but there are at least effects to be measured that can give some proof. Theorizing what happens with the soul and how that connects with the world is much harder to ground in reality, a reality we can all understand, and not just the imaginative mind of a few individuals.

Day 3331, imagine.

Daily picture, My thoughts

Let’s imagine. Let’s imagine, or maybe better said, presume, that we are all here by coincidence. This spinning rock around a sun has had billions of years to produce us, and this rock will be swallowed by the same sun billions of years from now, long after we are all gone and forgotten. We are not more than a sneeze of our galaxy, and our galaxy is also not much more than a collection of rubble attracting each other. 

Out of this will follow that all the rules, morals, and judgments are worth nothing besides their role in other made-up constructs. So what if we stop judging, and even better, and in theory even possible, what if we no longer learn kids how to judge. Show them the world in all its glory without judgment and let them grow up that way. Kids don’t care about the color of your skin, the country you’re from, or the gender you have or don’t have. The imagination in my thought experiment is thus the following: what would a world look like in 50 years, when most children have never learned how to judge? Imagine all these so-called world leaders who stink up the place now, and the only thing they do is to make sure the trains run on time and that there is food on the table. Politicians are no longer needed in a world like that, just people who know how to manage and organize, and they do that purely because things have to be organized, and do that without any imaginary reasoning.

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Day 3327, some more notes.

Daily picture, My thoughts

I like to believe that humans think the same way now as we did 50000 years ago. With thinking, I mean the strength of it, the speed, what we can accomplish with it. If it is possible to develop a good IQ test, we wouldn’t do much better now than someone living all those years ago, someone who’s figuring out how to crack the right stone to get a knife out of it. We have a much larger well of knowledge right now, which can aid us, making it appear that we are much smarter. On the other hand, there are probably not more than a 100 people who are living in modern houses right now who can make a good flint knife, and only because they studied it and not because they figured it out by themselves. All I want to say is that there were also Einsteins living at the beginning of our civilization; the only difference is that they lacked the instruments and wealth of knowledge collected and written down that they could build their theories on, and most of all, they lacked any means to let us modern people know what they knew. We have this wealth of apparent knowledge, and we all know more on average than someone living a hundred years ago, but that doesn’t mean we are smarter, let alone that we make better decisions.  

Humans are the product of many millions of years of evolutionary development, and how and why we think the way we do is still not completely clear. It is clear that on an evolutionary timescale, some form of consciousness just happened a second ago, and from the first caveman to me writing this is measured in milliseconds. Thinking in the sense of explaining ourselves also plays a minor role in our daily business, so to speak. We often react and come up with a reason for why we reacted that way after the fact. The words we use function more as bandages in many cases. An example of a trigger we inherited is that most of us jump from sudden movements in our peripheral vision because millions of evolutionary years have “learned” us that jumping is better than not jumping. After all, the jumpers get bitten less by that nasty snake crawling on their path and live to tell the tale. Many of our behaviours exist because they are part of millions of years of evolution. Before we had words, writing, and laws, we already had thoughts in the form of feelings that drove us and made us jump out of fear for crawling creatures, but for thousands of years, we could not talk about these feelings with each other. We moved together in small groups in similar ways, lived together like we do now, but in silence, doing what felt best. The different human species lived like that for a long time, and it is only a relatively short time ago that we started talking about what was driving us and why we are doing the things we do. 

In that sense, we are still infants. Look at our society now, in 2025. We have a democracy like the ancient Greeks already had, and people still vote, and like in ancient times, they still vote for the loudest baboon. It doesn’t matter that the baboon speaks; it matters that he touches the right feelings, feelings we react to more than words, let alone logic. The people who know the right words to “enhance” their feelings understand that the baboon only makes noises, but they also know that a modern human is no match for a baboon. There is no denying that a strong figure in a group is something that has helped the human species along. We all felt safe in our mother’s arms, and that strong feeling lingers on in adulthood. When a fire breaks out, we all probably follow the loudest voice.

Day 3324, country above all.

Daily picture, My thoughts

I watched some America news again and realised….America is both the wealthiest country and the poorest country in the world. They truly believe what they tell themselves and don’t realize that there is another world beyond their own. Even well-educated people in America talk about America as being something special. The following quote from Barack Obama, for instance.

“There is not a liberal America and a conservative America – there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and asian America – there’s the United States of America.”

In my book, the last people who were so proud of their country were the Nazies in Germany and Italy. Obama is of course no Nazi but for some reason he also worship the flag and obviously need it as some kind of security blanket like the rest does. Or did he had to play that card? And is that not even worse? Obama is probably a decent person, but the constant pledges of allegiance he made while growing up have also had an influence on him. Perhaps he could have said that we are all humans and that all these distinctions are merely made up.

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Day 3320, Bauhouse.

Daily picture, My thoughts

I watched a fascinating documentary about Bauhaus, an art school that had a profound influence on architecture and design. What I liked the most in this documentary was what it showed of the students and how progressive they were 100 years ago. It was, of course, only a tiny island of light in a large sea of backwardness, but it’s good to see that contrast when it is so hard to see now. I also understand better now why I enjoy taking pictures of all these straight and clean lines; perhaps that resonates with the progressive mindset I aspire to have.

Day 3299, draft.

Daily picture, My thoughts

They say that the earth is not doing well, or, to narrow it down, the people living on this rock are not working together well.

First, the Earth. I am no expert, but even if we all wanted to, we could not destroy the Earth. I doubt that in 500 million years, there will be any trace left of us, and we could not even imagine what will see the sunset by then, but I am pretty sure it is not reminiscing about us while enjoying the colours.

On working together. If you read history in a certain way and combine that with some unattached observations made during your own life, you will know that two or more people working together is more often than not a challenge. Even if you live with the same person in the same house for many years, you will still encounter odd miscommunications that result in late arrivals or worse.

Most of us have also worked in groups, whether at work, in a sports club, or organizing a family event. If you work together enough, a certain rhythm will take over, but I can’t imagine someone who has never felt a slight chaos while achieving a goal. Sometimes you see this happening right in front of you, as someone who is led around, but also when you have been in charge, the feeling of a loss of control will not be unknown to you.

Now extend it to the country you live in. There are good leaders, and the bigger the pool, the larger the chance one of these exemplary leaders will be in charge. But even if this is happening, these people’s organizing skills have to be delegated downwards, and the first layers in this bureaucracy might be staffed by competent people, but soon the first administrators are directly recruited out of the cultural habits of that particular country, and acting accordingly. From a few people to the largest countries, they all had and have their goals, they started in the direction they wanted, and sometimes reached them. However, they all share a low efficiency, a high amount of wasted resources through mismanagement, and incompetence.

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Day 3279, walled in.

Daily picture, My thoughts

This weekend, someone mentioned that he has been influenced a lot by Iain McGilchrist. I never heard of him. He has written some relatively famous books that are also very lengthy. YouTube to the rescue, and there you can find many lectures and interviews. I like many of his ideas; some of them are inspired by ancient wisdom and religions, and it has to do with the way people act and react in the world, but as a neuroscientist, he can look at the actual brain and see, in fact, what happens if you “turn off” the left or right part of the brain. His theory, in short, revolves around the idea that right-brain people are more thoughtful and left-brain people are more efficient without regard for the consequences. He argues that a balance is necessary and that there have been times when rulers, or the societies as a whole, were more in balance. It is interesting, and It is worth learning about it. There is an agenda for why he is pushing his ideas, and that has to do with the environment and how we destroy it and with the mindless rush for more power and money by a small elite that, in his mind, is on a trajectory to destroy the world.  

YouTube cannot be YouTube if it does not recommend other similar programs, and one of them was from another thinker and activist. His name is Daniel Schmachtenberg, and he is not only looking depressed, but his message is also depressing. Just watch the video, and you will know what I mean.

The thing is that I can understand what they say. The hard data is not lying, and though the world is always governed by people with little empathy, insight, and wisdom, the problem is now that besides the nuclear weapons that could kill us, it is now also possible to develop with the help of AI viruses that have the potential to kill us all. And climate change seems to be something that everybody tries to ignore. It might not affect us, but the story might be different in 50 to 100 years.

I don’t know what to do with this. I try to live my life as consciously as possible. I try not to pollute more than necessary and try to be thoughtful in my interactions with the people around me. I educate myself and think about ways to educate others. I like the idea of anarchism because it has the potential to take away the handful of leaders who always seem to mess it up for us. But all of this is child’s play, and the best thing it does is keeping my consciousness clean(ish). 

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Day 3278, Sunday morning.

Daily picture, My thoughts

I walked through the city today and brought along an old friend, my Nikon D700. I have not used it in a while, but like many old friends, I still knew how to turn it on and what buttons to push. 

Like most Sunday mornings, there were not many people around, which made it easier to ignore them. People are interesting, but I prefer the spaces they leave behind. The empty streets with all that is left tell many stories; I don’t need the noise from whoever left it.

Day 3260, against ideality.

Daily picture, My thoughts, Poetry 
Abandoned factories are often more interesting than the ones still in use. 

For me, it is the activity, the moving parts, and the workers doing their work in silence that I see projected on what is now, old.

I imagine, and what I imagine is often a more refined version of reality, with harmony as its guide. 

Reality necessarily rubs against ideality.

Day 3255, and study history.

Daily picture, My thoughts

I don’t have many feelers in the world about what is going on. I get a notification on my phone if something noteworthy is happening, though I block all the news regarding certain billionaires in charge in a country I think is not even real. I listen to some podcasts, and the commentary I get there tells me a lot. One is from an old Dutch historian, Maarten van Rossum. He is over eighty years old, and he has seen it all. He often gets the question if he is not worried about what is happening in the world now, and he laughs about it. Of course, some things are not good, but all the alarm is so dumb (his words). I also remember the Reagan days and the fear we had of nuclear war. I though life as we know it would end, but it didn’t.

I don’t listen to what is happening in America because I am worried; I don’t listen to or follow the news from that place out of some sort of shame. Can you imagine if the Martian came and asked for our leader, and he showes up… it’s just so ridiculous that I have a hard time believing that it is happening.

I also have to say that in between getting up, going to work, being busy with restoring these wooden boats, coming back home, drinking some coffee, making dinner, writing something on my blog, and playing some mindles games while listening to something interesting leaves little room to be worried or feel threatened by the world. Things are safe here in Norway. The doors are still unlocked, and I can’t remember ever seeing the police this year. Most people’s lives are pretty uneventful, and an information overload causes most worries, I think.

In the early eighties, I was worried, but also just 9 or 10. I was worried because my mother was a lefty, and we went to anti-war and nuclear bomb demonstrations. And there were also posters in the house warning about these bombs. I was not worried because I understood the danger; I was told to be worried. If my mother had been a right-leaning conservative, I would probably have felt safe with these nuclear weapons protecting us from the comies, and I would have had an other memory.

There is a big difference between the immediate danger of a real war that is happening around you or if you live in an objectively dangerous neighborhood or the danger you feel because you are spoonfed fear from whatever direction you lean your mouth to.

I recommend looking at your news app only a few times a week but leaving the notification on in case something important happens. No social media except if you only follow family or specific interest groups that are not news-related. Reading books is healthy, and good old-fashioned magazines, even if they are digital, are a good substitute for flashy websites.

Having discussions online or in the real world seems to be interesting, and maybe it doesn’t matter that the social group that influenced you in the past was your family and some friends, and now half the world, but discussions about your opinions are as fruitless as trying to describe the Mona Lisa if you have never seen or heard of it.

And study history. We live in strange times now, but you will be amazed that there have always been periods that were strange and, more often than not, much more dangerous than the time we live in now.