Empty Day
... and our failure to talk about the problems of our world.
Another Sunday, Another Naive Weekly - Observations From The Internet Wilderness.
I’ve started working again. Not full time — I hope I’ll be able to never do that again — but still enough work to feel the week was shorter. Those days where I didn’t work, Ana and I were searching for a new place to call home and caretaking Uno. In other words, it feels like yesterday I was sitting and writing the last issue of this newsletter.
But it isn’t, it is Saturday evening, a whole week has passed and the others are sound asleep as I am typing these words. Therefore I’ll keep it short. I should already be nesting next to them, preparing myself for tomorrow, because with a two-months old at home we never know when tomorrow begins.
Today, October 11 it is Empty Day. The day when we should switch off social media to switch on ourselves. It is funny that we only need one empty day per year. Most religions have at least once per week and I find this to be the best reason to stay multi-religious. I believe not-doing is often doing and doing is often not-doing, at least in certain matters.
With care,
Kristoffer
VISUALLY PLEASING
READER INTERVIEW
Maarten Tak speaks with great passion when conversation hits capitalism, society, and ownership models. Since the age of 19 he has spawn out a series of projects relating to technology and the world we live in. Most recently he founded Causa Sui, bringing circularity and sustainability to consumer products.
K: What would you be doing if given financial stability and three months space?
Maarten: Exactly what I am doing now. I don’t have financial stability at all at the moment, I don’t even have my own place currently and I might or might not be in Vietnam in a few weeks or months. But despite this uncertainty, I am working my ass off to get my new venture off the ground and I’m loving the rollercoaster. No need for anything else.
K: What question would you ask a tree?
Maarten: I’m not sure if I’d want to have a conversation with a tree. Either they will be ridiculously zen, because they’re old and all they do is breathe all day and see a few rabbits pass by, so they will probably answer all questions in some vague and elusive Yoda type of way. Or it would imply I’m tripping on acid and the last time I did that in nature it didn’t end well. So either way, I’d prefer to just sit next to the tree in silence rather than talk to it.
K: What is covered in your shadow?
Maaten: Conformity.
K: What was one rabbit hole you recently fell into?
Maarten: A friend of mine is reading the book “the immortalist” by Alan Harrington (tip!) on his youtube channel and during one of his experimental nights, he decided to read something else made by someone called “Jon Bois.” I had personally never heard of him, but damn, this guy makes content and lots of it! It’s mostly about sports and I don’t really care about that, but he has for instance a TWO part video series of each over 40 minutes, about the name “Bob” in sports. It’s really incredible. Just.. Idk.. Click it.
K: How do you prepare for death?
It took until last year, when I turned 30, to finally have been able to overcome my fear of death — and it has been the best thing that has happened to me on an emotional and existential level.
Like many in their 20s, I felt stuck in my pursuit of meaning, bathing in self-loathing, battling depressions and numbing my restlessness with alcohol and drugs. I rectified the fact that I knew that it was pointless, with the fact that I knew I was melancholic by nature and thus felt I had to drown in meaninglessness in order to find my own purpose in life.
This continued for many years until Death came to visit me. A close friend had hung himself at home after months of reaching out to me to talk and I was “too busy” being lost myself. Experiencing the impact it left on those close to him, my need to write my own suicidal poems quickly subverted. He did what I felt I wanted to do, but the reality of the consequences was too bitter and left me feeling dirty about having these thoughts myself.
Shortly after this, I read the book “The denial of death” by Ernest Becker and it changed my life forever. I finally understood what I was fighting: It wasn’t meaninglessness or hopelessness, it was the responsibility to construct meaning for life in the face of Death.
I suppose when a young thinker hits the realisation that all is meaningless and there is no absolute existential truth to why we are here and how we can live a good life, they can either choose to wallow in powerlessness and denounce those who move beyond this point as traitors in the conquest of absolute truth — or you can accept this fear of a meaningless death and life in order to create your own illusion that is worth living for.
This breakthrough gave me the confidence to break free from my parent’s expectations, to build up patience for the unfair world around me and funnel my existential restlessness in productive explorations of life. I stopped comparing myself to others' success, I started making music even though I suck, I founded a new company and I finally started to understand what people meant with “living in the moment.”
I’m not afraid to die anymore. I actually prefer to feel Death’s breath in my neck as much as I can, for this will push me to be more honest, direct and ambitious. To enjoy life more and worry less. To love more and forgive quickly. I know it sounds meta and hippy, but I think it’s true. I hope everyone will find a way to see how their fear of Death is withholding them from getting more fulfilment and meaning in life and that it one day can become a non-taboo topic to discuss with friends so we can help one another to move beyond it.
ROADSIDE FLOWERS
Create your own track. The platform emulates Roland’s classic TR-808 drum machine and TB-303 bass synthesiser.
INTERNET STORIES
Congress Gets Ready to Smash Big Tech Monopolies
Since 1998, Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon acquired more than 500 companies. This has been possible because society has been pro-monopoly for almost three decades. However, today the tide has changed. In this excellent post, Matt Stoller outlines how a recent report from the House Antitrust Subcommittee is an important step towards breaking up Big Tech Monopolies.
I use Spotify to play white noise for Uno. Apparently I am not the only one, because an entire industry is trying to capture our desperate searches with artists names such as “White Noise Baby Sleep”. Real music, fake artist — or at least not an artist who’ll play at the festivals. On one hand this results in a decoupling of music and the creators, and on another it leads to an explosion of reality.
Over the last months I have been invited — *invited myself* — to an increasing number of informal networks. I still struggle to find the rhythm to participate in these Telegram groups and Discord channels, however, there is something interesting around these smaller groups popping up everywhere. If you want a waterfall of energy on the topic, this post by Other Internet is where to get lost.
INTERNETMEZZO
Meet Wiby, the search engine you forgot could exist.
“In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were personally interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages. Google isn't great at finding them, its focus is on finding answers to technical questions, and it works well; but finding things you didn't know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no longer happens. In addition, many pages today are created using bloated scripts that add slick cosmetic features in order to mask the lack of content available on them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today's web.
The Wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet. In addition, Wiby helps vintage computers to continue browsing the web, as pages indexed are more suitable for their performance.” — Wiby
Hi, I’m Kristoffer and you have just read Naive Weekly - Observations from the Internet Wilderness.
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Photograph by Ana Santl.
<3
Kristoffer