I’d started writing this entry a week ago, on the second morning of a lovely holiday in Bratislava. The plan was to travel on to Hirschwang an der Rax, south of Vienna, on 21 June. On the final leg of my journey there, I got off the train and travelled back to Munich overnight. I’d previously missed four trains in a rather strange way (two of which were my own fault), and I wasn’t feeling well.

To explain my absence, I wrote that there was something here that needed my attention, and I now realise that this is indeed the case. But that was not the immediate cause.

A kind of depression that I’d like to call a ‘dark night of the soul’, at the end of which there may be an insight. It’s part of a game I’ve been playing with myself, one that began a few weeks ago. I could call the game: ‘Am I repeating my past?’ Although I managed to avoid the most unpleasant situations – which would have occurred had I carried on my journey – I still lost the game. I think I could only ever lose it.

Perhaps more on that another time. Here is my original post:

The possibly most important book of the year for me (and hopefully for many others)

The day before yesterday, whilst travelling from Munich to Bratislava, I was reading the Kindle version of a book on my mobile. And I’d finished it by the time I met my husband at the airport late in the evening. I spent the whole day reading that one book.

Emma Holten is a Danish political economist born in 1991. Her book is called Deficit.

It is the most insightful analysis I have read on why the countries of the Western world with its wonderful values find themselves in such a mess – and why their inhabitants are dissatisfied and often unhappy, despite their abundance and every comfort.

The mess: the way things are valued by monetary standards, with a financial system that is disconnected from real, truly valuable things; the wealth gap is widening ever further, with a progressive erosion of the social fabric in a society where it is becoming increasingly difficult to nurture what is truly human – that which is the most valuable and dear to us – and to give it enough space. People do it anyway, thankfully. But it has become more difficult than it once was. And it affects not only the way people treat one another, but also nature – the non-human world around us.

I have copied out many passages from the book. For now, here is one key point: following decades of Keynesian economic policy and the welfare state, which invested in healthcare, care services and education, attitudes towards these sectors began to change in the late 1980s. Instead of being seen as investments, they were now regarded as expenditure. And this expenditure could be cut without the consequences being immediately apparent.

The so-called economic science works with figures, with what can be measured, and because the areas mentioned elude such measurement, they are simply not included in the simplified but practical models used in this field.

One of Emma Holten’s great strengths is that she refrains from pointing fingers and sees good intentions in the desire to measure economic output. However, there is plenty that can make one angry. The book starts with the fact that, from an economic perspective, women represent a deficit, and that this is also how they are portrayed in the press – for example, in a Danish newspaper in 2020: “In net terms, women continue to be a cost to the state.”

Here is an interview well worth listening to, in which Emma Holten and the interviewer, Kathy Shields, discuss other key points from the book.

And here’s the finishing paragraph, which I like, from an interview in the German Frankfurter Rundschau paper:

Of course, care work is difficult and can be a burden. But for many, it is also a great source of joy in their lives. And we are currently denying that to many men. That was something that was truly astonishing when my book was published in Denmark: many men used it as an opportunity to reflect on what they are missing out on.

Jean Ziegler

On 10 June, the Swiss sociologist Jean Ziegler passed away at the age of 92. His books live on, and I hope that many people will read them. (I read Change the World at the start of the year.) It deals with a similar, if not ultimately identical, theme to that in Emma Holten’s book. If we are so rich, if today’s resources could feed everyone, why doesn’t that happen? What is standing in the way? – A way of calculating things that allows the rich to acquire ever more assets (including land and other people’s labour) without actually having to work for them.

In the 1960s, Jean Ziegler drove Che Guevara around Geneva. Ziegler would have liked to join the revolution in South America. But Che Guevara said, “This is where the monster’s brain is; this is where you must fight it.” That set the course for the rest of Ziegler’s life. He pursued what he called “subversive integration” and used his positions as a professor and later as a UN special rapporteur to highlight injustices and seek to remedy them.

I hope that many of his messages will now be heard more widely. The corruption that causes so much hunger, unfortunately, still persists. The question arises as to whether it can be tackled directly, or whether there are other ways.

Here are two interviews (in German), one on the Bavarian channel Bayern 2 from 2019, and one from alternative media outlet Apolut from 2015.

Thomas Greco

Thomas Greco, who died on 15 June at the age of 90, is less well known, but he too was concerned with similar issues to those addressed by Ziegler. In his books, he explained how the interplay between politics and the banking sector works, and how it came about.

He never tired of emphasising that money can also be created outside the banking system, for example within a network of producers and consumers who lend to one another. Here is an essay on the subject: How to solve the money problem in a nutshell.

He had recently been in touch with members of Growing the Commons. I was supposed to be part of that discussion, too, but the invitation was sent to the wrong email address. A short while later, he asked me what I thought of his redesigned website (https://beyondmoney.net/), but I didn’t get round to sending him any feedback. I am sorry about that.

He also posted a comment here on a Collaborative Finance article that my colleague Michel had published:

Greco and Ziegler have made significant contributions towards a fairer world. Their work will be carried on by others.

Book therapy - Midlife and Adler

One day I was sitting in the book store Hugendubel and “read” two books in a couple of hours. (I skimmed through a third one, about ADHD.) I’ve done this before in a bookshop. I can skim through a book in such a way that I get a good impression of its entire content.

I spent most of my time reading a book called Mitte des Lebens (Mid-Life) by Barbara Bleisch, who is well known from the Philosophische Sternstunden programme on Swiss television. She explored various aspects of growing older, such as coming to terms with one’s own mortality and taking stock of one’s life. How what is painful at the moment can take on a different meaning later on. What struck me was that, at this age, you often feel the desire to be part of something bigger than yourself and something meaningful. Yes, that’s certainly true for me. But I’m not sure if I’ve found the right thing yet.

The Japanese authors Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga have had a lot to say to me before, in their first book The Courage to be Disliked. It deals with Adler’s individual psychology, presented through a conversation between a professor and a young man. What I particularly liked about it was the “separation of tasks”. I can only do what I believe to be right. Whether others approve of that is up to them. It’s their task. Kishimi and Koga have written a second book, The Courage to be Happy.

I’ve taken a photo of a passage that deals with genuine self-transformation and how one judges the past. Genuine change is a bit like death, says the professor. “You could change. But that means you have to give up the person you’ve been up to now, and never again show the face you’ve had until now – as if you were essentially burying it. For once you have done this, you will ultimately be reborn as your new self. But can you choose death, no matter how dissatisfied you are with your current situation? […] In the end, [people] simply look for the positive aspects of their present circumstances, so that they can remain as they are.”

Shortly afterwards, he says, “In our world, ‘the past’ does not exist in the true sense of the word. It is merely painted within an infinite spectrum of colours of the present, each with its own unique interpretation.”

I find that interesting. And also a three-cornered paper column that he uses in therapy, which represents the psyche. On the two sides visible to the patient are written “the evil other” and “poor me”. That’s what most people talk about. If you then offer them validation, it can provide short-term comfort, but it doesn’t change anything. On the third side is written “What should I do from now on?”

My depression often sets in when I realise that things aren’t the way I’d imagined or hoped they would be. There’s also something specific that’s been frustrating me. I realise that if I were to speak to someone about it, that could be counted as doing something. But I’m not sure if it would be a good idea.

It seems as though I’m getting more calm and relaxed about it. I can see a way forward. Besides, as I’ve often said, there’s so much good in my life that I don’t want to complain.

There’s more I could write, but this post is already so long. For next time, I want to write from a less intellectual perspective… to be continued soon!

Translated with the help of Deepl.com (free version)

How the days just fly by. I’ve spent a lot of time sitting here, working on a web development project, and doing a bit of work on an interview and an article. And I’ve read loads! I’ve been jogging, and went for a swim once, and I met up with a few friends. I spent a day in Munich. I’m not doing anything out of the ordinary, and I quite like that. You could say I’m just going with the flow of my mum and brother’s daily lives. In the afternoon, I take the dog for walks.

There’s been a recurring theme over the last two weeks.

It all started when I watched the German Film Awards ceremony on TV with my mum. I don’t usually watch TV at all; it’s different here.

I was surprised by the quality. By the way the filmmakers spoke, the texts they read out. Wim Wenders made a lengthy appearance (he’s coming in for a lot of criticism at the moment; it’s about a scene in a film that he was asked to cut). Senta Berger. Both over 80 years old. Greats I knew from the past. It’s as if I need to be reminded: there are people who achieve truly extraordinary things in the field of art.

Artists are connected to the world of the wealthy. They may criticise the elite, but they still need – or at least appreciate – financial support. I’m simply stating this, neither criticising nor endorsing it. And I realise that that world is completely alien to me.

One film that kept coming up was Diese Lücke, diese entsetzliche Lücke (This Horrible Gap). Based on a novel by Joachim Meyerhoff. ‘I’ve come across him before!’ I thought to myself. I’d read a book by him. Meyerhoff has an extraordinary life story. He grew up on the grounds of a psychiatric hospital, and when he was 17, whilst on a school exchange in the USA, his older brother died in a car accident. Shortly afterwards, his father died of cancer, followed by his grandparents. A man who suffered great losses at an early age, which had a profound impact on the rest of his life. He became an actor, a path that took him a long time to find, and then a writer.

What had stuck in my mind from the novel I’d read was how, when Meyerhoff finally started to improve at basketball, a coach in the US told him he now had to learn to play to win. I can’t remember the exact words anymore. It would pop into my head every now and then when I was lacking motivation for something. You’ve already got better, so learn how to play to win! You can do it now. Flip that switch.

Skillful winning

While I’m on the subject of extraordinary people: today I watched the men’s final at the French Open tennis tournament with my mum. Alexander Zverev versus Flavio Cobolli. I’m not usually interested in watching tennis at all. But it’s amazing how quickly you get into it. Back in the 80s, I watched Boris Becker and Steffi Graf play, of course. Boris Becker was commentating here.

And it turns into this battle, this truly remarkable battle. On both sides. For a long time, I didn’t realise that in tennis, two people are actually creating a kind of work of art together. One player’s heroic performance wouldn’t be possible without the other’s heroic resistance. And just how much work goes into it. It’s unbelievable.

Zverev started playing tennis at the age of three, the same age at which he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Both he and Cobolli are coached by their fathers, who were professional tennis players themselves. After more than four hours of play, it took a great deal of effort for both of them to carry on. Zverev was more focused in the fifth set and won, before collapsing to the ground.

Then came the medal ceremony. I’m always amazed at how skilfully athletes like that manage to sum things up and express their thanks. The two of them are friends. “Next time, you’ll let me win,” said Cobolli.

But here too, that link to big money. Zverev holding up two Rolex watches to someone – asking which one he should wear now; probably product placement. The pose he struck when he kissed the trophy, for the photographers. It’s all a game. The game after the game. They’re so skilled at that too. But if you can play tennis live in front of tens of thousands of people, why shouldn’t you be able to do that as well?

Where am I going with all this? Playing. Playing theatre, playing the game of life, playing tennis. Playing to win and playing for the sake of playing.

Finite and infinite games

Fittingly, I finished reading a book called *Finite and Infinite Games* a few days ago. I spotted it on a list of recommended books. I’d started reading it once before, but couldn’t get into it. But I brought it here because I had a feeling it might have something to say to me.

And that’s exactly what it did. Its late author, James Carse, was a scholar of religion, but the book deals with faith only in the broadest sense; I would regard it more as a sociological and philosophical work.

Finite games are those played to win, and which end once victory is achieved. They are played according to specific rules. To be prepared against surprise is to be trained.

You play endless games so that you can keep playing. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.

A game played for a title is a finite game. The title endures beyond death.

In an infinite game, one plays to be part of something greater, and the game outlives one’s own death.

This is about games as a metaphor, and it also reminds me of Eric Berne’s book on transactional analysis, Games People Play. In it, he examines the recurring patterns of roles that emerge within groups of people.

I’ve already written nearly 1,000 words and it’s late. So I’ll stop here.

One of the most important ideas in the book for me was that, in a finite game, you can choose not to take part. Others may try to force you, but you only play of your own free will; otherwise, it is not a game. You may pay for not playing with your life, but even then you still have the choice not to take part. In this way, war can be seen as a cruel game. Conscientious objectors have often been, or are still, severely punished, even to the point of the death penalty. And yet, time and again, people chose that path.

For Carse, the infinite game is what matters most. It always contains finite games within it. But one must be careful that the finite games do not destroy the infinite game. The pursuit of profit and status, for example, are finite games that can have this destructive effect.

I’ll conclude by saying that we actually always have far more scope than we realise.

I can definitely gain a great deal from looking at certain things in a more playful way. I like what the author says in this text: playfulness can be the highest form of seriousness.

One of my endless games is writing, and I’m playing that right now as I try to write something here every week. More to come soon…

Translated with the help of Deepl.com (free version)

Deutsche Version hier

A hot summer’s night at the end of May. I got back yesterday from a four-day gathering in Vorarlberg. I’ve really been getting to know Austria of late!

And once again, it was wonderful. On the journey there, I realised how exhausted I was. I’d barely slept the night before, but it was the time leading up to it that had really worn me out. Nothing could have been a better remedy than being with my friends. There’s something beautiful that emerged from our outings, cooking together and late-night chats. We’re so different, and we’ve all ‘fallen out of the world’ in similar ways.

I’m not back in Bristol yet; right now I’m near Munich (it was a wild trip there yesterday; the 22 km from Munich took longer than the journey from Bregenz to Munich; I’ve often experienced chaos on public transport, but four hours is a new record). Altogether, I am going to be away for several weeks, with a few more stopovers along the way.

Ha, and here I am again trying to get something regular off the ground. I had a post almost finished twice. But I’m glad I didn’t publish them.

Throughout 2023, I wrote regularly, about once a week. My central theme was the social dynamics associated with the coronavirus.

And now? Yes, there is a central theme again that I want to follow; it’s already there. But I find it hard to put into words. The undertaking also seems riskier, as it is more personal. With the coronavirus situation, I was able to write as if I were observing something from outside myself (even though that wasn’t actually the case).

The more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.

This more beautiful world already exists, interwoven with the world we live in and hidden within it. The general mechanics, the ‘global system’, expressed particularly through the conventional, fiat-based and interest-bearing monetary system, work against it and threaten it.

It is possible to overlook this if, whether by necessity or choice, consciously or unconsciously, one is too preoccupied with other things to perceive it. That is my thesis.

To preserve and promote something. To contribute to that is my aim. I am thinking of the dialogue between Hillman and Ventura, in which they say that therapy should incorporate the world and thus become a “cell of a revolution”. Towards the end, they speak about carrying something forward, not letting a flame go out (I think they use this image, but I’m not entirely sure).

The crux of the matter is that there’s no simple guide here, and that everyone has to find their own way. But perhaps you can spot patterns, find better stories, and practise certain things, and these might be useful to others too. It’s a kind of skill, partly rediscovered from childhood, partly newly acquired. Perhaps you could compare it to learning to sing or dance. And whilst you can do it well on your own, it works best when done with others. Yes, I would say that for my purposes, interacting with others is extremely important, probably indispensable.

Hillman again: seeing traumas and scars as the very things that have shaped us, and drawing strength from them. He called this ‘the ore’ in the book mentioned earlier.

Setting out on this path is often uncomfortable and sometimes risky, but along the way one is richly rewarded time and again. It becomes difficult when one loses sight of the path…

So, the common thread: discovering the more beautiful world that is possible and contributing to its existence, within myself, in others and in the ‘world outside’. And ‘more beautiful’ does not mean ‘perfect’ – that is important! I would like to record my experiences and thoughts on this.1

If I manage to write every week, that is already a step along the way.2

There are many stories to tell from the trip to Austria, too, including some that were told to me. About herding the ‘summer cows’ over 60 years ago. About a taxi licence obtained in Berlin in the 1980s without actually knowing the city – but its owner went on to drive for nine years, including during the fall of the Wall. About a young man who was good at shooting in the GDR and was therefore posted to the border with orders to shoot; he was then expelled in 1989 and thought he would never see his family again… and many other fateful stories. But they belong to those days and not so much here. I just want to remember them.

The opening quote just reminded me of Betty Friedan observing something similar in housewives in the 1950s and 1960s. Many of them were unhappy, but most of them didn’t realise this about one another. Is this a more recent development for men?

Translated with the help of DeepL (free version)

Deutsche Version hier

As winter draws to a close, a bit of a gloomy post… which wasn’t the plan. How helpful is it to look back at history and try to learn from it, and what does that mean for us individually? Can we know more today than we did in the past? In any case, it interests me, but I also want to be active in the here and now and appreciate the beauty of the world along the way. Hopefully more on that soon.

Another attempt. I haven’t managed to keep up with writing regularly. I’ve now let it slide for nearly two months… There are various reasons: my standards are (too) high, and I no longer give up my sleep so readily. And then I suspect that, deep down, I’m afraid of what might surface whilst writing. That it might reflect something I’d rather not face (though this ‘something’ doesn’t necessarily have to be negative).

Ongoing wars

When I last wrote on here, the US had just invaded Venezuela, killing at least 50 people in the process, and moved the president and his wife out of the country.

That’s old news now. On 28 February, the US and Israel attacked Iran. During the bombing, a school was destroyed and over 160 girls were killed. When relatives and other rescuers came to help, the area was bombed again.

As I write this now, I sense the monstrousness of these actions. I haven’t followed much of what has happened since then. There are many analysis and explanatory videos. “Why the term ‘fascism’ is appropriate when talking about the US.” I wonder how helpful that is. Especially when it is then suggested that this has only been the case since Trump, when many of the criteria have existed for a long time. I do, on the other hand, admire Arundhati Roy for her clear statement.

Iran has struck back. The consequences of this war, in the directly affected regions and here, will be enormous and cannot yet be foreseen. I recently heard that Trump wants to de-escalate the situation. Prior to that, Iranian leaders had been targeted and killed. Peace is not in sight.

I am also thinking of Rojava at the moment. It was back in mid-to-late January that the autonomous region there was attacked by an army of the Syrian Transitional Army and lost large swathes of its territory. This sentence cannot do justice to the full complexity of the situation. I would like to write more about Rojava some time.

Not directly related to the war, although the person in question was in contact with various parties involved in the conflict: The Epstein Files. They were published in early February. They were covered in the news and in numerous Substack articles for weeks. Now just a footnote; I’d almost forgotten about them.

Neoliberalism and Marx (again)

I wanted to mention these things as they are shaping this era. Otherwise, I don’t want to dwell on them too much.

The developments of recent decades that have led to all this, on the other hand, preoccupy me greatly. And above all, I’m thinking about what new paths we can take in this precarious global situation to prevent it from being endlessly reproduced and escalating further.

I’ve bought, borrowed and started reading lots of books again over the last few weeks. It’s a bit extreme at the moment – I start one, then straight on to the next. Yesterday I started one by Jean Ziegler, Change the World (original: Change le monde: il en a besoin!), and got halfway through it. It was published in 2015. The 2010s are an interesting decade, as the global financial crisis of 2007/08 was still fresh in the memory, but the turbulent and confusing events of Brexit, the Trump presidency, Covid, as well as the new armed conflicts and attacks of recent years, were still ahead of us. (Nor was there yet any AI with far-reaching social influence.) A time for reflection and analysis.

Ziegler sees it as the task of sociology to bring to light what those in power would prefer to keep hidden. The book brings together much of what I have read elsewhere, but which I was not yet aware of in 2015. Whilst one can argue about many perspectives and interpretations, experience has clearly shown us a number of things: for example, that the effects of neoliberalism inevitably lead to a gross redistribution of financial wealth, and to impoverishment and hunger amongst large sections of the global population.

Ziegler writes about the Washington Consensus consolidated in 1989 (a programme for countries with weak economic performance, established in South America in the 1980s), and when one reads the objectives now, it seems crystal clear that acting on them is a recipe for disaster: reducing the tax burden on the highest earners so that the rich make productive investments; abolishing tax breaks for the poorest; lifting restrictions on financial markets; dismantling the public sector as far as possible; maximum deregulation of the economy; no state subsidies for staple foods in the Third World to keep prices low, but instead have the state spend on infrastructure in which multinational corporations have a stake, and so on.

This is how Ziegler describes it in the book. When you read the man who coined the term, it becomes clear that he genuinely believed the things he described were good. Some points are open to different interpretations, and one of them suggests that more should be spent on the poor and the health service than on other subsidies. Overall, government spending and inflation should be kept low.

I think that even if economists believed these programmes were good for the countries, steps were always taken to ensure that capital owners were favoured. Once that happens, it will ultimately always result in wealth accumulating among the rich and inevitably being taken away from the poorer sections of society, even if the official line is otherwise.

Ziegler draws on a wealth of knowledge and experience, and quotes many philosophers, theorists and writers. There are numerous references to Brecht’s poems. He also mentions Marx. Overall, Marx seems to be relevant at the moment, insofar as his analyses and his method – historical materialism – appear helpful in understanding the history, and indeed the present, of capitalism. My ‘co-editor’ Dave is writing a series of articles that is set to become a book. Initially, the working title was The Commoners’ Manifesto: Why Marx Was Wrong. Following criticism from a few people, he changed his mind, and it is now called The Commoners’ Manifesto: Neither Capitalism Nor Communism. (‘I was being too harsh on old Karl’)

Who are the heirs of the former working class?

Haha, I’m starting to think I must be coming across more and more as a die-hard socialist. And that’s after my flirtation with the ‘right’ (well, the libertarians at least) during Corona times.

On David Bollier’s podcast – he’s one of the leading advocates of the commons – there are a couple of conversations I particularly like. One of them is with Peter Linebaugh, a Marxist historian, according to Wikipedia. I’ve now listened to two more podcasts with him, which provided further insights into the history of the enclosures, particularly regarding the criminalisation of those deprived of their livelihoods, and the use of the death penalty — death alone was not a sufficient deterrent; dying had to be made particularly cruel.

Linebaugh once asked who, nowadays, was taking on the task traditionally assigned to the working class of bringing down capitalism. (I can’t remember the exact wording.)

And the fact is: capitalism must fall if we as humanity are to survive. That may sound dramatic, but that is because the situation is indeed that dramatic. Capitalism simply means: the system we have right now (as Dave so aptly puts it).

I’m just wondering whether, given that capitalism is cushioned by so many unpaid activities – looking after children within the family, or mutual support among friends – it might not be able to survive even longer as a result. But extraction and economic growth are, in any case, rising exponentially and will eventually hit planetary limits; the only question is when.

I believe there are heirs to the working class. But they span all classes; indeed, I am tempted to say that they are found particularly within the ‘middle class’. Middle class is one of those debatable terms, yet everyone knows what is meant: people with resources and connections, who are well-mannered and educated. For me, those are the defining characteristics.

I don’t necessarily count myself among them. Or perhaps I’m just on the fringes. It’s something I sometimes struggle with. And at the same time, it could be an advantage. Perhaps.

Communication and conflict

This post is already quite long and it’s getting late. I just want to set a direction so that I can continue writing in about a week’s time.

Perhaps what my life is all about right now is overcoming certain perceived shortcomings that point in this very direction: becoming more effective, and learning to communicate and organise myself better. Negotiating and debating. In short: to communicate better. Both verbally and in writing. To conduct interviews. To write articles.

What can possibly go wrong?

It just occurred to me again how Adler talks about feelings of inferiority, which are normal and legitimate! Everyone experiences them when they feel outmatched by those who are more experienced and competent in a particular area. They serve as an incentive to learn and improve. Feelings of inferiority only become a problem when you dwell on them constantly. When you’re obsessed with the idea that you’re inferior and can’t shake it off.

I like the other aspect: that you can overcome a temporary sense of inferiority. Of course, the journey there is often uncomfortable. You have to accept that.

Two days have now passed. I have now finished reading Jean Ziegler’s book. It’s a mixture of different things. In a section on the failed decolonisation of Africa, he mentions many very cruel things. It also seems that in the 1950s to 1970s, any African politician who campaigned for genuine independence was simply killed, by Western secret services or their allies. It’s unbelievable.

Then there’s also the issue of working conditions in Bangladesh, where, a few years before the book was published, several factories that had been built too high collapsed onto the workers there, killing thousands of them.

There are anthropological observations, and towards the end the focus is on how human societies organise themselves. Ziegler writes of various groups of scholars, including some French ones, whom he classifies as practising ‘generative sociology’. They reject the division into ‘developed’ or ‘underdeveloped’ societies, as well as the term ‘emerging economies’. Nevertheless, they do have criteria for evaluating societies:

“Their key distinguishing feature is the extent of violence a society employs to resolve its anthropological conflicts. If it regularly resorts to massive violence, it ranks at the very bottom of the ladder. If, on the other hand, its mechanisms for resolving conflicts (between families, between neighbours, between members of a clan, and so on) involve rituals and institutions that respect the autonomy of the individual to the greatest extent possible and involve only minimal coercion, then the society is regarded as exemplary and stands at the very top of the hierarchy. Here is an example: there is no doubt that repression plays no part whatsoever in the strictly ritualised collective trance, the reproduction of the order of the universe by the possessed, as practised in the Candomblé of the Nagôs […]. Compared with the criminal justice system, psychiatric institutions and prisons of Western societies, the institutions of Candomblé demonstrate a significantly higher degree of civilisation than is found in Europe.”

This brought home to me once again something I’ve often discussed with friends, and which Fabian Scheidler writes about in The End of the Megamachine. As soon as you step out of line in our society, you quickly find yourself confronted with violence, and structurally speaking, it’s always there anyway. Those who live their lives conforming to the norm might not even notice it.

Ziegler quotes Kant: “The inhumanity inflicted upon another destroys the humanity within me.” He believes that a new consciousness is developing in Europe and elsewhere, and that a “front of resistance” is emerging, made up of people who “no longer wish to submit to the ‘cannibalistic world order’”.

I think that’s true, except that this front of resistance has been (temporarily) weakened by the Covid years and other divisive events. But for some, it was precisely these events that led them to join it in the first place, as was the case with me. And I do indeed have the feeling that social division and othering are on the wane. Here, at least.

Yesterday I met up with a good friend who’s travelling as a digital nomad and whom I hadn’t seen for eight years. He’s been travelling the world for over ten years now, though he often stays in one place for months at a time. I asked him what he’d learnt from his travels that he hadn’t known before. He said he’d come to realise “how much of the world isn’t Europe”. That keeps coming back to me now.

Good night for now; I’ll write something more personal again soon. But my personal life is also influenced by what I’ve written above. That means I often feel as though I’m living in two worlds at once. In one where cooperation is already a major focus and everyone can contribute; and in the other, where competition takes centre stage and you first have to “earn your living”. I wonder how inevitable violence and wars really are… I cannot believe that violence cannot be curbed, and that war cannot be avoided.

The first month of this new year is already coming to an end. Now I finally want to publish the entry I started weeks ago. At the beginning of the new year, I found myself in a strange state of torpor and felt almost incapable of working. But the last few weeks have been interesting again. I finally managed to write an article1. Helena Norberg-Hodge came up in it, and in the newsletter about her 80th birthday, I found a link to a course called Radical Futures. I signed up on the spur of the moment. Eight three-hour sessions in two weeks!

I didn’t attend everything live, but about half of it. And I saw Helena Norberg-Hodge and Paul Levy (author of two books on Wetiko and one on quantum phenomena) on Zoom, which was really enriching. I will sure come back to the content of this course sometime.

I hope to start writing weekly again. It helps me! I think it will be a little different than before. Possibly more about my personal experiences, and perhaps a little more consistent. (Haven’t I thought that before? We’ll see.) But I’m sure I’ll still write about books. Politics too — hard to avoid these days.

But here’s the original text.

I started this entry about a week ago [it must be four weeks now], I think it was the day Trump invaded Venezuela, killing at least 50 people and flying out the presidential couple.

That gave the year a strange and surreal feel, and I don’t think that’s going to go away anytime soon. After a short paragraph about Munich, this post will also turn political...

Back since January 1. How quickly the days are passing again...

We spent 10 days near Munich at my mother’s house. They were wonderful days during which we were thoroughly pampered, but I also cooked and baked a few times myself. Walks with the dog, trips to the city, and to Bad Tölz for tobogganing on the Blomberg (an adventure! Here in England, such a steep and icy descent would probably not be allowed for health and safety reasons). A day in sunny Innsbruck, from where the ‘kids’ flew back a little earlier. Meeting up with co-conspirators and old school friends. It’s only afterwards that you realise how nice it is to be free of any obligations.

What I didn’t give up during this time was reading. Both books and Substacks. But the books were more important.

The intellectual world war

The first book I want to mention is quite something, in several respects. Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism by Gabriel Rockhill. For now, just a brief outline from memory: The book is the first in a trilogy that Rockhill calls The Intellectual World War. It deals with how the Cold War was also fought culturally, and how influence over culture may have made other aspects of it possible in the first place (armament, the overthrow of socialist governments, McCarthy’s witch hunt against communists, the integration of Europe into NATO). It is about the massive influence exerted by the USA. Of course, the Soviet Union also did that (but with less financial means for sure), and it would be interesting to know more about this, but it appears only as a side note in the book.

Rockhill focuses on philosophers of the Frankfurt School, first Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, then in detail Herbert Marcuse, who was of great importance to the 1968 movement. It is about the connections to the OSS (Office for Strategic Services), the predecessor of the CIA, and then to the CIA itself. There were many other European authors who were favoured by the CIA. The significance lies less in the fact that the CIA directly paid cultural figures to spread certain ideas. It was more that a framework was created within which they operated. Rather than puppets, an entire stage was set up on which the actors then performed.

I first encountered Rockhill in 2018 or 2019 in an article about the CIA and the Left in postwar France. That was also the first time I heard about the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Here is an interesting German documentary from 2006 on the subject2. At the time, I bought a book by Rockhill called A Counter History of the Present. It contributed to reinforcing my existing doubts about the maxims of our culture.

One caveat: Rockhill is biased. It seems to me that he is too uncritical of countries with “real existing socialism.” But I am also interested in learning more about this. If we have indeed always viewed socialism solely through the lens of our own culture (”Stalin. Yuck. Boo’) and successful socialist governments have been overthrown (see Chile 1973) — would it be worth taking a closer look and seeing if there is something to be learned from it? Moreover, there is no precise definition of what this word actually means, and there are many different forms of it. My idea would be that everyone is provided for (food, acceptable housing, social integration with the opportunity to contribute to society) and no one has to get into a spiral of debt. Add to that a lean state, and that wouldn’t be a bad start for me. Ha, of course, something is still missing: freedom. That’s where it always falls short, isn’t it? Freedom is always in danger, no matter what political system you live in.

In any case, the book explains a few things, such as why we now have this strange phenomenon known as “cultural Marxism” (wokeness and identity politics), which has nothing to do with actual Marxism.

Woman as Human

I will only mention the next two books briefly, as I don’t want to use much more time or space.

I had requested this book: Woman as Human (Die Frau als Mensch) by Ulli Lust. It deals with the prehistory of humanity as a cartoon, with a focus on the greater significance of women and femininity itself. It also features contemporary hunter-gatherer communities, in particular the Khoi-San (also known as Bushmen). There was a story in it that I hadn’t heard before. In the 1960s, an area was set aside for the Khoi-San—the Central Kalahari Game Reserve—to enable them to continue their traditional way of life.

Diamond mines were discovered there in the 1980s. From 1997 onwards, there were several large-scale expulsions, during which the wells were also sealed. In 2006, the Bushmen won a court case allowing them to return, but their drinking water supply remained cut off. This was only secured in 2011 after a further court ruling.

The book first describes a hunting scene in great detail, then states that when it was filmed in 1997, it was already history.

You can read more about the history of the expulsion on the Survival International website.

It wasn’t so easy to find this on DuckDuckGo; what appears are mainly striking depictions of the Bushmen’s way of life, as if there were no adverse effects at all.

Now I have brought this sad story (which also testifies to the possibilities of resistance though) to the fore. But it was also what made the biggest impression on me.

The book is beautifully illustrated. It is feminist and does not shy away from taboos. I also found myself laughing at times. When discussing bonobos, who use sex to resolve conflicts, Ulli Lust asks whether it might also be helpful for two female politicians at a summit meeting to rub certain parts of each others bodies (the book phrases it slightly differently). I thought I recognised Merkel in the illustration.

Dreams of peace

When I got back home, I read a book by Arno Green called I Want a World Without Wars (Ich will eine Welt ohne Krieg). It revisited themes from his earlier books, particularly the splitting off of emotions in children whose needs are ignored by their parents and whose feelings are unwanted. I wrote about this once before in 2023 (in German).

The book made me realise once again how much wars and other terrible man-made events can be traced back to trauma. And it encouraged me to continue believing that things can be different.

Oh, this has turned out to be quite long again. And it’s mainly about books.

What’s going on in my life right now? I’m stuck again. But I’d better write about that when things have settled down again, which I hope will happen soon.

Finally, I’ll come back to Marx. I discovered that his son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, wrote a pamphlet called The Right to Be Lazy. I find this very interesting for several reasons. Maybe I’ll write more about it next time.

First, here’s another little quote (not to be taken too seriously, nor completely dismissed—I think):

This text was translated with the help of DeepL.

Will I manage to write this time?

I’ve already made several attempts, but in the end I didn’t like the results enough to publish them.

Something always intrudes, as if I had to solve something through writing, something like a difficult puzzle. Can I only solve this by this semi-public writing, not in a private diary? Maybe I’ll be able to express myself more precisely, or maybe I need the possibility of an echo, an encounter?

Ultimately, it’s about where I’m headed, professionally and with my volunteer work — which in my case actually merge completely. I now see what I am currently doing for free as my profession: writing, editing, providing technical support for a few things (website, forum, wiki, internal communication platform), and participating in the organisation of various groups.

I hope that one day I will be able to receive financial compensation for this, which is entirely possible. Otherwise, I will have to find an additional source of income.

But then—and this isn’t going away—there’s also the desire to start something (or get involved if others are doing something like this): a kind of network that could be about “doing business” largely without (conventional) money.

Twelve years ago, I started this with a friend: https://www.codehub.org.uk. It’s a group where people help each other with programming. For many years, I was the main organiser. I created the website, set up a bank account, found sponsors, organised meetings (three full-day events, which I also moderated), and helped launch a mentoring program together with a super programmer.

I remember looking at the results of our questionnaires and seeing pairs gradually forming (usually around ten in number). Mentors and those looking for mentors. It was almost magical. I experienced it during the three years we did it.

The Hack Night, which was started by an American who had recently moved to the area (“Can I organise this through your group?”), still exists, as does the Python Dojo, which was started by a Greek friend of mine, also a fantastic programmer. She moved to Berlin a few years later.

I look back on that time with nostalgia. There were so many special experiences. Lately, I’ve been becoming more aware of that again.

I am very impressed by Stephanie Rearick in this conversation with David Bollier, which I listened to this morning.

It’s about Mutual Aid Networks. She’s been doing this for 20 years, and on so many different levels. The networking is also happening globally, which is really nice.

Here’s an article about it: https://www.bollier.org/blog/stephanie-rearick-building-social-wealth-through-mutual-aid

A picture is coming together, with a few unknowns still missing...

At the moment, I feel great gratitude for what was and what is.

Today I will only write a short entry. This is inversely proportional to the many different things that have been going through my mind over the last week.

Unfortunately, I still haven’t managed to get rid of my irregular sleep pattern and lack of sleep. The new pattern is that I go to bed at four or five and then can’t fall asleep. (Two days ago, I managed to sleep from three, and the next night from two, yay!). But I’m not tormented by dark thoughts; in fact, I find everything quite exciting and thrilling. There are doubts, but even those seem more neutral than before. There’s almost something creative about the sleepless nights. But then I forget again — until something I’ve already thought of pops up again.

What I am thinking about is not particularly cheerful. It has a lot to do with our predicament as humanity. And then I am not sure whether the alternative groups I am involved in can really make a difference. There is something paradoxical about it. I suspect that the people who are so committed to the commons are not always the best ‘commoners’, myself possibly included. It is something we long for, not necessarily something we are good at. There is a lot of ego involved. Some people think their solution is the best and that others should adopt it.

My difficulty is that I don’t always find it easy to move within a group, see what needs to be done and so on. Nothing to lose sleep over, really. Nevertheless, ‘commoning’ is not necessarily my natural element. But perhaps my task is to become better at it.

What is certain is that I cannot return to my old life. There was the night when I wrote a letter to my longest-standing school friend, as I had already announced, only in my mind for now, lying awake in bed. We haven’t seen each other for almost three years. There was an attempt this year, but then she fell ill. Otherwise, just birthday calls.

That’s another mystery: how can it be so difficult for me to either simply — yes, what? Turn a blind eye, respond with love and understanding? Or, on the contraty, explain why I think the divide has become so deep that it cannot be bridged at present. The feeling comes first, and then you try to rationalise it. I have to admit that we no longer live in the same world. (But who lives in my world? Maybe other worlds are more compatible though?)

Ultimately, despite many ups and downs, I feel that I am in the right place where I am right now. I am actually learning a lot, including about what I am not (yet) good at. But sometimes things turn out better than expected.

Eddington

I spent one of the late nights watching Ari Aster’s film Eddington, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Emma Stone. The film is set in New Mexico during the coronavirus pandemic. Joaquin Phoenix plays the sheriff of the small town of Eddington, who faces his great rival, the mayor, in the election campaign for office. I had expected the film to be funnier. It is billed as a comedy, but it has a very dark sense of humour. Some things are well captured. There is a scene in a supermarket where a homeless man without a mask is escorted out of the shop to applause. Phoenix is also out and about without a mask because of his asthma and is approached by the owner. This could have happened in many places.

Furthermore, there is a Black Lives Matter protest, in which young people indulge in theoretical concepts, completely confused, and beg the black deputy sheriff in vain to join them. The constant checking of mobile phones and how everyone, regardless of their background, is manipulated by them is also well captured.

Then, at some point, everything goes completely haywire. And violently so. At the end, Phoenix takes a mega machine gun from an abandoned gun shop and starts shooting around with it. It’s kind of funny in a way. But I realise that I don’t want to watch films like this anymore. It’s too close to the truth. Not to mention the wars that are currently being waged in so many places, now with drones (which also appear in the film). It’s impossible to imagine the USA without weapons anymore, which is something I think the film also conveys. It can’t be done without them, and it’s supposed to be a Western, so it’s grotesquely exaggerated.

And finally, a large new data centre is sitting in the ground, shining. Something else that’s there to stay, it seems.

Writing this blog post has been delayed because I was ‘in labour’ with the article I was writing. I keep coming back to this image of childbirth (in German, we also say ‘difficult birth’ for something that takes a long time to realise). It’s almost starting to annoy me that I keep calling it that, but it’s so apt. However, after I finished the article, my husband sent me a GIF of a woman in labour, and it made me laugh.

Money and magic

So, the baby is here — The invisible logic of the market: the case against money — Habermann again. That wasn’t my intention; I had initially wanted to write an introduction to collaborative finance. By an interested layman for laymen, so to speak. I thought it might be easier to understand that way. But the question here is also who is a layman and who is an expert, because it’s a rather unknown field. The thing about money is that it’s not really tangible, especially in its collective form. The energy of money is distributed in all the distant corners of the world, but then also very concentrated — unfortunately!

I think this concentration among billionaires represents the intercepted trust of millions of people. There is trust in money, in the numbers that are being moved around. Trust in it meaning something. But it mainly means something because it is the only reliable way to feed oneself and purchase other necessities, as well as pay one’s taxes. So it is a forced trust.

Anyway, I’m no expert, so I would have to draw on my ‘punk’ mentality, which I do possess. Perhaps it is even overstretched at the moment. In any case, I got cold feet and then referred to the book.

The process is also like giving birth because, as there is something irrational about the way that I write1; I let whatever is stuck in my head rise to the surface. And then I have written through the night several times. In the end, I am exhausted but continue writing anyway. ‘It’ writes me, more than I write (which doesn’t mean that it flows smoothly; it’s often halting).

And then also: it would have been very difficult to give it up. Outwardly, that wouldn’t have been a problem. No one in our small “editorial team” was waiting for the article, even after I mentioned it — probably too quietly and uncertainly. (On the other hand, when the draft was ready, people helped me with corrections and comments. I am very grateful for that. Four other people were involved besides me.)

I couldn’t really let it go, it had to come out. There is something about this topic where I feel a great need to bring it into the world. The fact is that without having a greater say in how giving and taking is structured in our lives, nothing positive will change in the world as a whole. The abstract concept of financial money robs people at the bottom of the pyramid of their vitality (also, the money created from this is used for destructive activities). It’s actually like in Momo.

Of course, it’s not very clear how to break away from the status quo, but a few things are starting to crystallise — perhaps. I hope I’ll be able to write about it at some point.

One last thing on the subject of money — and writing. One of the things that slowed me down was that I read so much in between. — I keep trying to find more answers, and I’m starting to read all sorts of other things.

I instinctively opened this PDF file in my book directory, Money and Magic by Hans Christoph Binswanger, from 1985. He interprets Faust II, which also features a money printing scene, to mean that the multiplication of money and the use of money for a ‘construction project’ is an alchemical process.

While his love for Gretchen never prompted Faust to exclaim, ‘I would like to say to this moment: Stay, you are so beautiful,’ it is the successful reclamation of land by pushing back the sea (which happens to involve burning down the home of two elderly people and a lime tree) that brings him this happiness. It is an entrepreneurial project that evokes the highest of emotions. Binswanger also sees Faust II as a warning that nature is being consumed by the economy and converted into money.

I found all of this extremely interesting. I only read the first part of the book, skimming through it once again. The second part is more about the relationship to today’s economy. That would certainly be worth reading too.

Stratford, Birmingham and ‘Neurodivergence’

I was in Stratford and Birmingham over the weekend, and my sister-in-law was visiting us. She also came with us to Birmingham. I first made a detour to Stratford to visit a friend. He had arranged a visit to Shakespeare’s birthplace. The house has been changed a lot since his time, including the addition of gables to make it look like a drawing of the house that someone had made without actually knowing what it looked like.

In any case, there was a lot that was authentic, and it was very interesting. For example, four of the children slept together on one bed, sitting up, leaning against the headboards (which was apparently common practice), each sitting on a corner. Overall, however, life seems to me to have been similar to modern times at the end of the 16th century. We can also easily find our way around Shakespeare’s plays and comedies, and there are countless phrases from them that we use today.

My friend also came with me to Birmingham. It has the largest German Christmas market outside Germany (imported from its twin city Frankfurt). I’m just going to say that — and he definitely started the trend about 20 years ago, so that now there are Christmas markets everywhere, including Bristol. At these markets, you can get not only mulled wine but also beer to go with your German bratwurst.

In the evening, we went to a restaurant called Indian Brewery. And that’s where this conversation about neurodiversity came up. Oh dear, that topic keeps coming up in my life. But I didn’t start it in this case! In fact, I don’t really want to talk about it that much anymore. The fact is, hat from an early age I had real difficulties fitting into society, didn’t know ‘how to behave’ in certain situations. There are many possible explanations for this, which I don’t want to go into here. Yes, and ADHD. The conversation was mainly about ADHD. Three out of four people with ADHD! My husband was the only one without it, apparently. Hmm, so three out of four... who is the ‘divergent’ one, I remarked.

In any case, it wasn’t all that serious. But it was interesting nonetheless. What is it that makes someone a deviant? I actually have great difficulty with “time management”. But that’s another inappropriate term. You can’t manage time. That brings us back to ‘imperial modernity’, where you have to fit into certain time periods. 9 to 5. My birth pangs writing, for example, doesn’t fit in there at all. Only artists can be allowed to do something like that. According to popular belief, they are all a little crazy anyway, and penniless because of their non-conformist ways of working. Which is, of course, a cliché. Writers in particular are often very disciplined.

What if we live in a time when people are intolerant of many of their fellow human beings’ idiosyncrasies? Yes, it is already so ingrained that we must conform to certain things, and if we fail to do so, we immediately look for the fault in ourselves. However, I think this applies more to women than to men. Although perhaps this is already changing.

Strangely enough, reading the book Ausgetauscht! also gave me the feeling that things could be different. As if I could see the glimmer of something else. If we actually did what came naturally to us based on our individual characteristics (along with a few obligatory things, which few would object to), how different our world could be.

If you have felt inadequate for most of your life, it is not necessarily that easy. And — you have to come to terms with others. Ha! That is the big caveat. If you were to try something like that, the most likely place to do so at the moment would be in an ‘alternative’ community, intentional community or something like that. I also have an inner resistance to this because of the ‘righteous leftiness’ of many people you meet in such communities, which I sometimes find a bit restrictive. And at the same time, I’m thinking, is it justified to write that?

In any case, I am currently living my own little version of “life outside normal society“ life. The huge catch (but at the same time also part of living outside society) is that I don’t earn any money. That’s a problem. I could probably muddle through for a while longer. But it would be better to find something. My tribute to society. It would be good to find something that at least serves society, or at least some people in this society. I’m going to start looking.

Kindred

Last time, I wrote about how I had started reading Kindred by Octavia E. Butler. I have now finished it. I found it very captivating. The time travels of the black writer Dana — sometimes accompanied by her white husband — from 1976 into the 1810s, from Los Angeles to Maryland, to the American South before the Civil War.

She is ‘called’ by one of her ancestors (without him knowing how this happens), whose name she knows from records, and discovers that he is a white slave owner. However, when they first meet, he is only five years old. She is always drawn to this time and place when Rufus is in danger and must then rescue him. During each of these journeys, time has passed in the past and Rufus and the other people from that era have grown older. She experiences a great deal of violence and cruelty, all of which is related to slavery. Unfortunately, she also realises that the relationship of trust that develops between her and her ancestor has no influence on him gradually growing into the role intended for him.

I see it as a book about power. About the different types of power, both negative and positive. Power over, power within, power with. Also about oppression and how it happens. It is interesting how the power imbalances of the different identity characteristics intermingle here. Black or white, man or woman, but ultimately also unconditionally freedom-loving (better to die than be imprisoned) or submissive. It is important to note that Butler does not make any moral judgements about the latter; submission often happens for good reasons and also for the benefit of others. I think this book also has a lot to say about our times.

The translation of this post got a bit delayed, the original is from 10 Novemeber, and I’ve written two since.

What I have read, seen and heard lately

Yesterday, I was engrossed in a book until late at night, or rather until early morning. It’s not that it was so ‘exciting’, but there are times when I feel like I have to read something specific, that it’s the thing to do right now.

The book is called Ausgetauscht! (End of exchange) and was written by Friederike Habermann. It took me a while to really understand the title and what ‘exchange logic’ is all about, and then ‘exchange-logic-free’.

It’s about the logic of the market, where almost all services are assigned a monetary value, but then certain ones are left out, such as those that fall under the English term ‘care’ (this is also used in German, as there is no comparable collective term; it refers to nursing, care, welfare) and ‘subsistence economy’, i.e. self-sufficiency, as it exists in many former colonial areas. Much of this ‘outsider’ activity is not recognised, but is nevertheless incorporated into capitalism. However, this is not the main focus of this book. Instead, it asks: how did our economy get to where it is today, and how can we do things differently?

According to Friederike Habermann, exchange logic always leads to certain phenomena such as competition and exploitation. People act under duress rather than according to their needs and abilities. There is overproduction and, at the same time, scarcity.

I find her argument convincing. The difficult thing is to imagine how it could be different, since we live in a market economy and have grown up in it. Of course, there are some areas where we organise ourselves spontaneously without money, but it is difficult to apply this to the world of work. Perhaps a little less so for me than for others...

I then read some of Karl Polanyi’s “The Great Transformation”, which is also relevant to the topic. I had started reading the book once before, and there is also a good documentary (German version of the ARTE production) about his thinking.

Habermann’s book mentions the peasant uprising of 1525, which, like so many events on German soil, was extremely cruel, especially the suppression.

I had heard about this 500th anniversary just a few days ago at an event to which I had unexpectedly received a ticket from someone. It was the presentation of the book Common People, a volume of essays, analogue colour photographs and reproductions of paintings. It also contains a very detailed timeline of the Enclosures. I must have a closer look at it.

Author and photographer Leah Gordon mentioned that there is no monument to the enclosures in Britain. While the violence that took place in the colonies had been acknowledged, the same did not apply to the violence against their own people.

She then mentioned a sketch by Albrecht Dürer, which he had made in 1525, a design for a peasant monument. Yesterday, I discovered that it had been realised this year in Thuringia.

This is a bit of a leap, but this book also appears in Habermann’s text: a friend sent me the link to the documentary film about Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. I was familiar with the concept, but the film clarified things that I hadn’t been aware of. The fact that the book and film are over ten years old makes them particularly relevant today.

A very eclectic list, isn’t it? And yet these things are thematically connected.

I’ve also read a little further in Self & Unself, and hope to continue reading Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth soon.

Kingsnorth is currently experiencing extreme burnout. I’m not surprised. I hope he recovers from his illness soon and can then enjoy the necessary time off.

What’s ‘going on’ for me right now

Work-related: Working with others to set up a wiki on commons and sustainability — the content comes from the Lowimpact website. I am also in the process of writing an article.

‘Wage labour’: I have made a few attempts to find something, but nothing concrete yet.

Last Sunday, my daughter was still here and we made biscuits and made chocolate truffles. In recent years, I have only managed to make biscuits once during the pre-Christmas period, if at all. That is why it is remarkable for me.

To conclude, here is another beautiful saying, in my opinion (despite or perhaps because of the slight resistance from my inner pessimist):

On another evening, I gave up on my second attempt. Instead, I wrote a Python script to transfer the topic intro pages of Low Impact (a website with information on sustainable living) to a wiki. I started late and it took me another night... but it gave me a boost.

This is just the beginning of the wiki. There will be specialists who will take care of the topics. I am curious to see how it will all turn out. In any case, I like the articles, and the alpacas are extremely cute.

Apart from these night shifts, the week was also quite busy. On Tuesday, I did an ‘interview’ and attended an event organised by the Good Food Network Bristol in the evening. We had guests over for dinner twice, which was nice and relaxed.

Fateful logic

Well, and then... I read the Ausgetauscht! book again. I read it properly this time, not just skimming through it. Not only that, but I followed up on many articles and other books that were mentioned in it.

And something clicked. It was already there when I read it before, but... I think the book is changing something for me.

I am convinced that Friederike Habermann is right in her assessment. That what she calls ‘exchange logic’ is a fundamental malady of our current economic system, if not the main malady. It is fundamental to competitive pressure, “squeezing” (the pressure exerted by companies on their suppliers to produce cheaply), exploitation, destruction of nature, war. If we cannot curb the dominance of this mechanism, we will not get anywhere.

It’s about something called equivalence logic. The value of something on the market is always measured by how it can be produced in the fastest, cheapest way. Habermann gives the example of a woman who lovingly handcrafts a chair, which takes her hours to make. But a mass-produced chair at Ikea takes only a fraction of that time and is therefore cheaper to buy, setting the standard for what a chair should cost.

I am thinking of the pressure exerted on farmers to sell their vegetables at low prices.

So what appears to be a ‘fair exchange’ is in reality usually not.

That is only part of the book. It also deals with how prosperity in the West in the 1950s and 1960s was only possible through the exploitation of the so-called Third World countries.

Habermann discusses Rosa Luxemburg’s theory of capital accumulation — and the headwinds she faced at the time (1913). The theory states that in order to continue growing, capital always needs the exploitation of non-capitalist areas or sectors (including the unpaid labour of women). Habermann first quotes contemporary authors who drew similar conclusions and shows that Luxemburg was already aware of this at the beginning of the 20th century.

There were further a-ha moments when Habermann mentioned feminist approaches. There are so many types of feminism that it gets a bad rap overall. But what Habermann said in this context made sense to me — perhaps I will write more about it sometime — about housewifisation and other things.

I would like to read Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici. I have heard about this book many times.

What’s new to me: it is not just about the monetary and financial system. Or rather, that system can only be tackled by removing as many things as possible from market logic.

Some communities are already experimenting with this, and Habermann was (and probably still is) part of one such community.

Of course, there are some objections to this, and I myself don’t always find it easy to deal with commons communities, as I noticed again yesterday at an event. But accepting this and practising communication is ultimately worthwhile, also on a personal level. And there is no convincing alternative!

Fiction, finally

I seem to only ever read non-fiction books. Today, without having to force myself, I picked up this book and started reading it: Kindred by Olivia Butler. It also fits in with the theme...

Deutsche Version hier

A friend asked me if I was going to write something like a logbook, and I think that’s a good description. It then occurred to me that ‘blog’ originated from ‘weblog’, i.e. web logbook. Twenty years ago, many people wrote something similar to what I am doing here, which could be described as a personal public journal. Nowadays, that doesn’t happen that much. I would like to revive this tradition.

These are some guidelines I’ve set myself: I have two hours to write a short entry, and I’m setting myself a target of 500 to 800 words.

I can already see that I will only be able to fit in about one hundredth of everything I want to say. Hopefully, with time, I will get better at filtering out the essentials.

This immediately gives rise to a slightly anxious feeling — I have to formulate my thoughts well enough for them to convey what I want to say.

Also, I have this obsession with truth. Some people — I have at least two of them in my family — like to embellish their stories by exaggerating things or altering them in a way that, in my opinion, distorts the actual events. Sometimes I then ‘correct’ them — ‘no, it was a little different,’ ‘that’s not right,’ and so on. The catch, however, is that I don’t remember everything exactly either. I, too, might make mistakes, just by misremembering things.

In any case, this is a lengthy explanation of my intention to be truthful and honest in this blog (not the same thing, see above), but always open to changing my mind or acknowledging corrections.

3 x 3

Will there be anything at all where that matters? We’ll see.

And now to the content: In short – everything that’s on my mind right now. What’s happening, what I want to do, and how I can get or keep things reasonably balanced.

Two three-part divisions came to mind last week, and now I notice that one is vertical and the other horizontal.

What is on my mind can be divided into three broad categories:

• The world, global issues, politics, etc., ‘the world at large’

• My immediate surroundings, the city I live in, the groups I belong to (although these can be spread across the world if we meet on Zoom)

• My immediate life, my family, my daily routine

The boundaries are fluid. Perhaps I can think more carefully about what they are . One could say that if we start with the smallest unit and move upwards, my influence diminishes. After all, we have no influence on world events. No, I believe that’s not true. Helena Norberg-Hodge has this expression, ‘big picture activism’. You work locally, but with an eye on the big picture. I like that. Only I can’t really call myself an activist yet. But maybe I am moving towards that, slowly…

In any case, even if I wanted to, I cannot take my eyes off the big picture. And I think most people I know would agree with me when I say that what we see is horrendous. Here, too, we can perhaps object. We only ever see the terrible news; there are surely many extremely positive developments that we never hear about.

But still, the mere fact that wars are being waged on an industrial scale is unacceptable and is leading us into the abyss. It hurts to see my home country seemingly styling itself once again as a belligerent party, and full of war rhetoric (I am not yet clear whether the intention is actually to wage war or if this is ‘only’ an economic reconstruction measure).

I remember a friend saying, ‘War is humanity’s worst disease.’

This is also one of the reasons for my second ‘vice’ that I cannot give up. The global monetary and financial system.1 It is an ongoing project to understand it, to impart knowledge and to participate in initiatives that are working to become at least partially independent of this system. Ultimately, I don’t have to understand everything, which is not really possible anyway, in order to move on to points two and three, but certain basics are important. I am still in the early stages of all this, but I am far enough along that most people who are not involved with this topic no longer understand me. Hence the need to gradually improve point two.

So, that’s the vertical division, and I’ll probably write about all these levels.

Head, heart and hand

The horizontal one: head, heart and hand.

I know this from the Shift course, and I think it comes from permaculture. When you take a holistic approach, you take care of all three. The following is a spontaneous division I made, not from Shift or permaculture.

• Head – reading, analysing, writing, listening to or engaging in intellectual discussions

• Heart – Understanding things emotionally, remaining emotionally stable, being empathetic towards others, taking an interest in something, becoming ‘fired up’

• Hand – Being active in the outside world, being energetic, getting things done, dealing with physical tasks – for example, cooking or gardening (and tidying up), working with others to put ideas into practice

Yes, and here I would like to see the balance improve. The balance does not seem right in the world as a whole, either. Especially in terms of what is valued. We are so cerebral!

And I am too. That is, I was perhaps even more so in my childhood (perhaps also because of the year when I was forced to ‘live in my head’ for a large part of the day). It has got better.

Peak Substack

In recent years, I have read so many different things, especially on Substack. Also in books — some of which I came across through Substack blogs. And I don’t want to miss out on any of that, as I have already written before. But at the same time, it’s time for a change.

I feel, and I hope this is partly true, that my knowledge has increased enormously, especially my understanding of certain contexts. Be it geopolitics, history, psychology or philosophy. I wish to understand, just to understand. But in this list, I see that action in the physical world is missing. People write about that too (for example, about what they do on their farm, about travelling, etc.), but I read less of those. And anyway, that is still through engaging the head.

When I read, I am in the physical world, but I am not acting in it. Does writing mean being active? More so than reading, anyway.

On this blog, I will certainly write about books and Substacks. But hopefully also about what is happening in my immediate surroundings and what I am doing (apart from reading and sitting at the computer).

For today, let’s start with a few books, not all of which I’ve read.

I’m currently reading a book called Self and Unself by Darren Allen, and I’m already quite far into it. It’s one of those books that I’m sure most people wouldn’t be able to relate to. Is it because it’s abstract? Is it abstract? I think so. But it deals precisely with the non-abstract. You can only refer to it with metaphors; you can never describe it directly. It does not belong to the self, to the ego. It is what lies behind the ego, consciousness. Consciousness is our only way of accessing the Unself, the eternal, the indivisible, that which we cannot measure. Something that many people would like to suppress and exclude, or are doing so (unconsciously).

That just flowed from my pen, or rather my keyboard. I wonder if Mr Allen would agree? Perhaps I will consult him about it sometime. I already had a brief email exchange with him in February.

Anyway, I found the beginning of the book a bit difficult, but now it flows, and it has an effect on me. I find it comforting in a way. Another major theme is the masculine and the feminine; perhaps it is even the main theme — and perhaps it is also the main theme in this world. Unfortunately, the feminine is far too underappreciated and not having much of an effect at the moment. And by that I mean the feminine as a principle, of course, not man-women like Thatcher, Albright or Clinton.

Every year, the German feminist magazine Emma chooses the ‘sexist man alive’ (you read that right - not the sexiest), and last year they chose the then Minister of Defence, a woman, Agnes Strack-Zimmermann. I always have to laugh when I think about it, but it’s a tragedy, really.

I should complain about some of the statements about women in Self & Unself, but I can’t really get worked up about them — women apparently can’t do certain things. But then neither can men (certain other things), right? Hmm, what women are ‘born with,’ men can only acquire over the years, says Allen. But women can never acquire certain things. There’s a bit of an asymmetry here. — What men cannot acquire, however, is the ability to create new human beings with their bodies. But they are diligently trying to do so by technical means! I sometimes wonder whether, instead of penis envy, there is such a thing as womb envy.

Time is running out... At least my experiment worked out for today, I wrote something. (Over 1600 words though, that wasn’t the plan.)

A quick note on some more books:

I haven’t read it, but I’m working on an article about it based on the transcript of a long conversation: Finding Lights in a Dark Age by Chris Smaje.

Some more books (which I’ve read) that would be good to write about on the GtC Substack:

• Grassroot Economics by Will Ruddick

• Pathways to Regeneration by Scott Morris and Stephen DeMeulenaere

And there are many more...

I also just remembered that I wanted to finish reading this article by Tine de Moor: Three Waves of Cooperation

I’ll write about what else I’ve been up to next time.

Wait, one more little saying: If you really want to learn, be prepared to look like a fool

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

Ursula K. Le Guin

What follows will not do justice to the beautiful quotes at the beginning and end of this post. It will be more like a diary entry, and its main purpose is to start again. To write here. The quotes are there because they are guiding stars in this moment.

The past two weeks: wonderful days in Styria — mountain hikes and walks, evening conversations over wine, and also during car journeys. Laughter, but also repeated recognition of the trauma that continues to affect us and society as a whole, and the task of dealing with it and defusing it.

Then a reunion with family and friends in Munich — here too, I am very grateful for all the (re-)encounters.

How is it possible that I haven’t written here for so long? — It might have something to do with another trip to Germany in February, which threw me off track a bit. At the same time, I was trying out writing something on Milosz Matuschek’s Pareto Platform. In short, I lost my rhythm, or let’s say, I didn’t get back into a rhythm in the new year.

This year has been quite a rollercoaster, especially regarding confidence. Are these just teething problems in my ‘new situation’? The uncomfortable process of emerging from the butterfly chrysalis?

The new situation is a wild mix of occasional web development work, writing, hanging out at meetings on the Bristol Commons, online meetings of our newly founded Growing the Commons collaboration, and exploring alternatives to the current monetary system. In June, I attended a Collaborative Finance conference in a beautiful spot south of Vienna, about which I also wrote a blog post.

Previously, in May, I had written a review of a book by Ester Barinaga, which was a “difficult birth”, but I am happy with the result.

You may notice that the words ‘commons’ and ‘collaboration’ come up repeatedly throughout this text. And yes, everything I work on has to do with that — and almost all of it is unpaid.

The contrast to my last paid (and very well-paid!) job couldn’t be greater. I worked for a large corporation that had bought our small start-up. I found what I was doing there quite pointless. Working on the development of an online platform that no one used. I also felt inadequate. So, I didn’t see much point in the work, but I still felt bad about not being good at it. What a combination. But the money was good.

This is just one symptom of the crazy times we are currently living in. I am not the only one in this situation. David Graeber, who died in 2020, wrote an entire book about people in bullshit jobs. It sarted as an article in 2013.

The current job conglomerate, on the other hand, is very intense, and I feel very connected to the people I deal with — eccentrics, as I probably am myself. The most amazing thing for me is that I didn’t know many of them a year ago. I can’t quite believe that.

When I try to explain the commons, I always start in a slightly different way because it is such a broad field. I often try to relate it to familiar things. In Munich, some people understood it better than before, so perhaps I am making progress. Earlier today, I was thinking about which aspects are personally important to me. There are more, but here is a start:

• Collaboration is more important than constant competition.

• Politics is best conducted at the local level (not exclusively, but as locally as possible, according to the principle of subsidiarity) and by the people who are affected by the decisions that are made.

• A counterweight is needed to the ongoing concentration of power and money in the hands of a few.

• It is a movement towards something that is more in line with human nature and brings us back into harmony with nature. In the latest post on the Growing the Commons blog, a conversation with former diplomat Carne Ross, he says that the commons is a “restoration of the human relationship with nature, a much more balanced kind of reciprocity”. I think that’s beautiful.

And finally, something from Steppenwolf, because this kind of humour is so important right now. I want to practise it...

One day after my end-of-year post, I had the urge to write another one. Or rather, the one I had originally wanted to write. I had it all in front of me and just wanted to let it flow out of the keyboard, so I started. And here I am, two weeks later... and another week later, at the beginning of February...

This year I want to experiment some more. I want to find out how I can throw something out without getting stuck in too much editing, re-evaluating and lengthy reflection. It's not called a scrapbook for nothing. It would be nice there could just be short notes from time to time. The following, to make up for it, is extra long!

This is a snapshot of topics that are relevant to me (and perhaps at this time in general), based on books that I am currently reading, have recently read, or would like to read.

1. Economy, Commons, Money Systems

These issues are at the centre of my attention right now, also in terms of professional and unpaid work. It's about replacing the prevailing economic model, which emphasises efficiency, competition and growth, at least in part, and supplementing it with networks that are geared towards collaboration, community and resilience.

I am particularly interested in monetary systems. The latest book I've found on this is called Remaking Money for a Sustainable Future: Money Commons by Ester Barinaga Martín. It's very logical and understandable and takes us from the basics of the properties of money and the different perspectives on it, to various initiatives such as mutual credit networks like Sardex in Sardinia or WIR in Switzerland, the ‘miracle of Wörgl’ with ageing money, as well as new cryptocurrencies, above all Bitcoin. The author analyses different types of money and how they influence the society in which they are embedded. She draws certain principles from this to create monetary systems with ‘healthy’ characteristics.

Before that, I read a lot by and about Bernard Lietaer, the Belgian bank manager and financial expert who died in 2019. He wrote books with various women, including Margrit Kennedy, Gwendolyn Hallsmith and Jacqui Dunne. All those books are about complementary currencies. Rethinking Money, with Jacqui Dunne, is the latest in the series, from 2013, which also gives a very good overview of the unsustainability of the global monetary system and how complementary currencies can provide a remedy.

Another interesting book is The Mystery of Money, which Lietaer wrote on his own and in which he analyses money from an archetypal perspective. It is quite fascinating. He puts forward the thesis that matrifocal societies — in addition to a monetary system used for storage and exchange and which was used in trade across distances — also have local currencies that only serve the purpose of exchange, not the storage of value. This makes these societies more resilient. He sees a suppression of female tendencies and the archetype of the ‘Great Mother’ in today's society.

I also find his observation that functioning ecosystems need a healthy balance between efficiency and resilience interesting. Efficiency is found in monoculture and just-in-time manufacturing, and is a more masculine value. When these systems are faced with disruption, they can easily grind to a halt. In that case it is beneficial if you can fall back on a variety of other systems that are less efficient but stable.

Lietaer wrote his last book, Towards a Sustainable World, in 2019, already aware of his approaching death, with the help of various authors. It is not specifically about money, but about three paradigm shifts that Lietaer believes must take place: 1. from a linear to a more circular logic (‘from Aristotle to Tao’), 2. towards a better balance between patrifocal and matrifocal (the current society is too patriarchal) and 3. from a centralised to a personal ownership of information.

Two other interesting authors should be mentioned briefly: Thomas Greco (currently publishing a new edition of his book The End of Money and the Future of Civilisation) and Brett Scott, who has published a lot about the importance of cash and has also written a book about it (Cloud Money), but not only that.

2. History, especially Imperialism and Totalitarianism

After my trip to London, where I listened to Mattias Desmet, I reread large parts of his book Psychology of Totalitarianism. This encouraged me to start with the classic that Desmet draws on a lot: The Origins of Totalitarianism. I've been reading it slowly but steadily over six weeks and am now about halfway through - it's about 600 pages with lots of footnotes.

The book is divided into three parts, anti-Semitism, imperialism and totalitarianism, and deals with many historical developments, the links between them and their significance in the overall context. It alternates between very dense passages, which you have to read several times to understand, and those that flow more easily. For example, I found the description of Disraeli as British Prime Minister entertaining to read.

Everything is interesting, and I have the feeling that the text has a certain effect that I cannot describe in its entirety. It seems to me that it is not so important to remember certain events as to get a sense of how certain things flowed together and developed into currents - often not controlled, but, as Arendt describes the acquisition of the British Empire, for example, ‘in a fit of absentmindedness’.

Which is not to say that there were not enough examples of people in power utilising certain ideologies. According to Arendt, anti-Semitism was the one that was best suited to making people manipulable and was used by the Nazi government primarily for this reason.

I can't remember where I read that Hannah Arendt once refused to summarise the statements in her book in a short text (I think she said something like, “then I wouldn't have had to write it”) or to look for colleagues who would write an endorsement for her book. I guess she wasn't much for marketing.

The book is not easy, but I really want to finish it, even if the pace has slowed down quite a bit due to the Christmas holidays and the job I have started. Not to mention the various other books that have inserted themselves in between.

With regard to imperialism, I should mention Naomi Klein's book Doppelganger, which deals with the subject in two chapters. I've written before that this had a strong effect on me, especially in combination with the four-part documentary Kill all the Brutes.1

Finally, a book that I have already mentioned a few times and that keeps coming up: Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira. There's a reading group for this book at Bristol Commons, which I'm part of, and so I'm going to re-read the book with others.

It seems to me that the most important thing about dealing with imperialism is to realise how it continues to have an effect, how it permeates our society and how it lives on in us (we are both perpetrators and victims).

I just remembered that about a week ago I devoured a book in one night that is not directly about imperialism. But it is about global economics and geopolitics, which are very much characterised by past and existing imperialism, which is also expressed in the book. It's called A Map of the New Normal. The author, Jeff Rubin, was once the chief economist of a major Canadian bank.

He writes with a lot of detailed knowledge from the past decades and argues that we live in a completely different world compared to 2020, and that we have to adapt to new circumstances. He compares this to the switch from left-hand to right-hand traffic in Iceland. There was a long period of preparation, but from one day to the next the traffic signs were on the other side and you have to look in the opposite direction to see if there was traffic coming.

The book was originally designed to describe the effects of the Covid crisis. Normally takes Rubin a year to write a book. But then Putin invaded Ukraine, and since then everything has changed even more, eclipsing the Covid crisis. According to Rubin, geopolitical blocs will form instead of a neoliberal global economic order.

The sanctions imposed by the US on Russia have not had the intended effect, instead causing Russia to detach itself from the dollar, with other countries following suit. And that is not the only consequence; he describes other developments that are favourable to Russia, including in the economic sphere.

Rubin also writes extensively about Germany. In his opinion, the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) was possible due to cheap labour from abroad (brought in from Turkey as ‘guest workers’ at the time) and cheap energy from Russia. Now that it is no longer available - the reorganisation of the infrastructure means that Germany is switching from Russian gas to the much more expensive LNG in the long term - and the car industry is being dismantled - China is leading the way with electric cars - the German economy is going downhill.

Overall, there will have to be a greater focus on local production, and not just in Germany. This could perhaps also have positive aspects in the end. Overall, it is impossible to predict how everything will turn out, but the fact is: there is no going back. Everything will be different!

Oh, it's all so cerebral! And I didn't get through my list at first. But continuing now…

3. Cultural Developments, especially in the face of AI

No books read, but there is a text that would probably be worth reading. It can be found here: https://www.thecompendium.ai/

And Charles Eisenstein has a - for me - comforting thought: 2

AI draws on the database of all recorded human knowledge. All recorded human knowledge. That sentence alone already points to its potential and its peril. Excluded from the LLM is all the human knowledge never recorded, especially the kinds of knowledge that cannot be recorded in the first place. Therefore it deepens our entrenchment in the kind of knowledge that has been recorded and can be recorded, along with, more insidiously, the ways of thinking that correspond to that kind of knowledge.

However, he sees this fact more as a warning of what would happen if we put too much trust in AI and let it summarise or interpret things. Then our understanding would become very narrow.

I also find this section interesting:

The dissociation of symbol from reality was well underway long before AI. Of all the symbolic systems that have spun off into fantasy, the most obvious is money. The wealth it supposedly measures has become so detached from nature and collective human wellbeing that its pursuit threatens to destroy both. The pursuit of money, rather than what it originally measured, is central to the collective insanity of civilization. Money collapses a multiplicity of values into a single thing called value. Similar problems result from any metric that reduces complexity to linearity, for example carbon metrics as a proxy for ecological health. Often they have the opposite of their intended effect, destroying ecosystems with biofuel plantations, lithium mines, hydroelectric projects, and fields of solar panels.#

4. Class Society

I read this book which is very enlightening about British society (and perhaps other countries too): https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/60262450-a-nation-of-shopkeepers

It's about how certain groups of people and their motivations are often not really understood and misclassified. Or people categorise themselves in a misleading way, for example claiming to be working class when they are not. This has political consequences, in particular the continuing failure of genuine social movements.

There’s a new development: People who originally come from the working class, or the ‘old petty bourgeoisie’, may earn very well (especially craftsmen), and young people who have a university degree sometimes have to keep their heads above water with zero-hour contracts. According to Evans, the latter belong to the ‘new petty bourgeoisie’ and formed the voter base of Corbyn, Sanders, Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece.

These movements did not manage to bind the actual working class to them though, but rather looked down on them in a paternalistic way, wanting to act for them, but not necessarily with them. It also happened that while having a tendency towards individual success and competition, the group of knowledge workers wanted to win over the working class in favour of solidarity, when in reality the working class itself embodied the principle of solidarity more strongly.

However, these contradictions are not insurmountable. The new petty bourgeoisie would have to learn to understand the traditional values of the old and the rejection of globalisation and neoliberalism which had often led to a political turn to the right. A strong rejection of bureaucracy on the part of the working class and the old ‘petty bourgeoise’ is also particularly important. The new ‘petty bourgeoisie’ should give up its ideas of social mobility, i.e. individual success, and a ‘career’, then a strong common movement could emerge. That was about it…

5. Our inner worlds

I rediscovered a book that I bought in the early 90s: Intuitive Living by Frances Vaughan. I haven't got very far in re-reading it yet, but it was good for me yo read the beginning. There's a sentence that comes towards the end of the book that I've been cherishing for 30 years:

The future does not need to be a repetition of the past. We often live with a lack of imagination and can only imagine the future by rearranging previous events and known experiences. Persistent attempts to explain the unknown with what we already know can lead to the blind repetition of unsatisfactory behavioural patterns that restrict further development and limit possibilities.

And:

Imagining the future does not mean attaching oneself to some object or circumstance that one wishes for; it means creating a new context for life. It is possible to create a context of trust in your intuition, in which all parts of your personality react as a whole to the problem or situation you are facing.

Good night!

Well, I'll file that under curious events of our times. The government can now speak directly to all its citizens, to everyone who has a mobile phone... it happened once before, five years ago, though only in writing. Social distancing please. And, then as now, stay at home!

Hopefully the storm will not be as destructive as the message suggested it might be.

As far as the subject of my last entry is concerned, I am now looking at it from a completely different perspective. What hurt me a few weeks ago, has now been blown away, in fact, I can hardly understand it anymore. I have now received the feedback that I had missed from multiple sides, and it has been so positive that the frustration seems unnecessary in hindsight. But of course I couldn't have known that beforehand.

Something else is happening. I'm being nudged out of my almost dozy state of excessive book reading, interspersed with days or nights of writing as well as various meetings - online and in person - into a busier existence. I have a job! That’s if I accept the task.

The feeling of being different, of not fitting into the world properly, is even beneficial in one way, but still perhaps a hindrance, too. It remains to be seen, which of the two is more important.

Anyway, it seems like a synchronicity that I wrote to an organisation I was very keen to work for, and among the things I offered them I mentioned being able to use static website generators. That's a bit niche, and I didn't really know why I mentioned it. But that's exactly what they needed. So that will now be my first task: Building a website for them. To think that I had run away from web development a year ago.

I had a conversation via Zoom and it went well. Feeling ‘different’ fits because the company is also at odds with the world as it is. It wants to tackle something that is fundamentally wrong with the current system. I've written about it before, it's the pyramid scheme that is our monetary system. Mutual Credit Services use various methods to support businesses in local economic networks, for example by cancelling mutual debts instead of everyone having to write invoices and wait for their money.

I'll certainly write more about that. They are also involved with the commons — especially Stroud Commons - which is interesting, too.

Yes, all that, commons, new payment methods etc., it will probably keep me busy soon and I won't be able to help but write about it. I hope it will be understandable and not too boring! I think these developments are very important. They are the future if we want to have a future worth living.

I wanted to come back to the end of my last entry when I was thinking about the fate of some ‘child prodigies’. What do their symptoms indicate? It's not just about the prodigies, it affects many other people too, but they are perhaps the most glaring examples.

The answer for me lies in something Josh Ellis wrote:

Why, though? Why are we so cursed? I think it’s a combination of two things: expectations and perceptions, both our own and those of the people around us.

Expectations and perceptions. If the expectations are internalised and it turns out that they cannot be fulfilled, a feeling of helplessness arises, which easily turns into a spiral of self-criticism, further non-fulfilment — which is interpreted as failure — and further feelings of helplessness.

In our society, so much is seen from a perspective of winning or losing. It's all about being better than others. A child prodigy has to outshine everyone. Those are the expectations. It's all or nothing. There is no in-between. You make it or you fail. You become rich and others have to go into debt for it.

The gifted child does not make it to the top, perhaps even inwardly refusing to play the game. In any case, it doesn't fit into the role it has been assigned.

If there is a refusal, it may not be conscious, and in any case it does not protect you from adopting the expectations and perceptions of others. Maybe all you can do then, is to consciously say to yourself: I’ll do what I enjoy, as best I can, I don't have to ‘win’. And to find people who appreciate you for who you are, where it doesn't matter what you achieve. Not living up to your talents may still hurt, and you can mourn that, but I'm sure it's possible to get away from the big drama.

Overall, it would be good if many communities formed where this mutual appreciation is practised, without constant evaluation and ranking. I think that's already happening.

One more thought on ADHD and autism, as these were also mentioned as consequences: I sometimes wonder whether these are endpoints of completely different developments, depending on who is affected, and a lot is lumped together here. I also wonder whether they are not often reversible. This is certainly not the case with severe autism. But it may be that the outside world is so overwhelming for someone that they shut themselves off and withdraw into themselves, but are then able to open up again at a later stage. The smartphone turns many of us into ADHD people. (Although I have to say that I already had such tendencies at the end of the 90s, and my perception of time in particular was often horrendously off; but as I said, there’s different developments)

As for my ‘ADHD’, I've never felt the need to become more organised and structured than I do now. I think I've made some progress too. It will sure be put to the test in the near future.

It is as if I am circling round a certain topic, or topics, where I run the risk of writing something from a point of oversensitivity and then it’s a bit whiny, and later I wonder, what was the point.

And yet, I do want to write about certain things, just maybe coming from a different angle. Something wants to wriggle its way out. Can it be of any significance to anybody else but me? Maybe I should not worry about that for the moment.

Why I am writing here:

• To document (these crazy times)

• To think

• To practice!

If I can connect with others, if they get something out of what I write, that’s great, but it would not work if that was my primary aim.

And this is somehow part of the problem: Thinking one has to justify oneself for being there. Everybody can stop reading after the first few paragraphs. And if they do, I won’t even notice it. This is a place where I can write something and be okay with not getting a response!

A recurring question: How much is the pain of the world connected to my own pain? Or anybody else’s pain. Are they reflecting each other? Or do we run the risk of projecting our own pain onto the world?

This has come up partly, because I felt some emotional pain last week, and that seemed to be a really exaggerated reaction to something. As I said, some kind of oversensitivity. But what if this only appears as oversensitivity, because most people have managed to numb themselves so much that they don’t see what is hurtful as such anymore.

And even if you take into account that how people behave is mostly nothing personal, it’s just because they are overwhelmed themselves — if the end result is something that looks like disrespect and indifference, it might just be perceived that way, however much you rationalise it.

And I believe, if we found ways to encourage people, make it easier for them, to be attentive, it would serve the not-so-sensitive people as well. Good communication is better for everyone, and might just make everyone feel better.

It is a bit like a supermarket once realised that everybody, including people without disabilities, liked the accessible version of a website (that is, clearer contrast, bigger fontsize etc.) better than the normal one.

Today, I was reminded of something Erich Fromm said, by reading it on the substack of a young German author, Lilly Gebert.

The most normal are the sickest and the sickest are the healthiest... The person who is sick shows that certain human things have not yet been suppressed to such an extent that they come into conflict with the patterns of culture and that they produce symptoms as a result of this friction. The symptom, like pain, is just an indication that something is wrong. The person who has a symptom is fortunate, just as the person who has pain when something is amiss is fortunate.

And yet, people differ a lot — I am often astounded, how much — and I would hesitate to call every ‘normal’ person sick. Also, we can’t consider every little personal sensitivity somebody might have. This is actually something a lot of collective effort has gone into over the past years, and it is exhausting. (I remember tech companies being scolded for having table-tennis, and employees drinking beer, because apparently women tended to enjoy these things less.)

So, I wonder, how much, and what aspects, of my coming up against the world as it is, comes from my own nature, and my past experiences, or even trans-generational trauma? In my case, there was a lot of difficulties with being social (as a child I think I was “on the spectrum”, and to a much lesser degree, I might still be today). Also, I was depressed quite a lot and had two major depressive episodes in my twenties. There were echos of those in the decades after. Probably as a result of that, I easily feel insecure and lack confidence, among other things.

But I have been mostly quite happy as well! I am grateful for so many things in my life. It’s just that I often seem to be in my own way.

I am looking for a different perspective. I don’t want to shut myself off emotionally of course. What I would like to do, is, when I have strong unpleasant emotions: Feel them, interrogate them, see whether they point to something that I can and should address, then let them go.

But also, I think there has been this feeling of… failure? I am interested in certain things, and when I want to contribute, to work on something, everybody seems so much further ahead… And would it not be okay to maybe grieve that a bit, and then just… get on with it? Start from a modest position.

How many people in this world feel like they are a round peg in a square hole1 ? I’d really like to know. And is that necessarily uncomfortable? If the sides of the square are about the same as the diameter of the peg, they can fit into the hole. They might just think, “hey, I am special, I don’t look like the other ones”, or they think, “I am different, I don’t feel right here.”

So, there’s the being different, and the not fitting in. And then both of those things could be judged positively or negatively. Or ideally, neutrally?

The not fitting in though, is mostly uncomfortable. People cut pieces of themselves off to fit in, or they keep wandering around to find places with bigger holes.

And if this regards work, and you really need the money, to provide for your family, to pay a mortgage, you are under pressure to find a hole.

What if you’ve been told you are special in some respect, but then you realise you find it difficult to fit in?

There’s a blog post from 2014 called Everyone is brokenhearted that I kept coming back to over the last 10 years, because to me it so fittingly described the sentiment of those times and beyond. 2014, that was before Brexit, Trump and Covid, but there was already a lot of violence. The ‘war on terror’ and Isis.

The other day, I checked what the author, Joshua Ellis, might be doing these days, and realised he is in London now. And he has a substack, but not posted for a while, he seems not to be in good health. The last post, from April 2023, is called Gifted.

He describes, how he could read from age two and was a super talented kid. And how in some respects, that giftedness was a curse. The whole article is heartbreaking.

I want to acknowledge that the terms ‘gifted’ and ‘highly gifted’ are used in a quite narrow sense in the context of school, mainly literacy and numeracy, whereas every child is born with brilliant talents. But those academic skills seem to be the ones that make children stick out most.

I am not nearly as gifted as Josh Ellis in that sense, but I feel some things in my life are a faint echo of his. (I am not American, not a man, and have a different background and interests, that has a further influence on particular outcomes). I would say I peaked at 11 or so. I just never needed to do any work at school, because I got all the important subjects straight away, like maths and Latin, and I just loved English anyway. I never did very much throughout my whole school career, and was fine. One school mate, when we were age 18, said to me “You can do anything”, because apparently I was so clever. But I Did Not Live Up To Expectations.

Towards the end of that essay, there are many passages that strongly resonate with me. Perhaps, these two the most:

Most gifted children, I think, tend to be unhappy. Social media is full of “former gifted kid” memes that we all post, and the tropes are unsettlingly familiar: a complete inability to finish what we start, abandoning hobbies or work as soon as it actually requires us to make an effort, an inability to easily form friendships... and most of all, an inability to Live Up To Our Potential. A lot of us suffer as adults from emotional disorders or attention deficit disorders. Many of us discover we lie somewhere on the autism spectrum; many of us end up as drunks or junkies. God knows I’ve smoked enough cigarettes and drank enough whiskey and done enough drugs of all sorts to kill a horse.

Why, though? Why are we so cursed? I think it’s a combination of two things: expectations and perceptions, both our own and those of the people around us.

Do you remember the first time you realized that a lot of society’s unspoken and unquestioned rules are, in fact, bullshit? That people spend half their time just doing busywork so their bosses will think they’re earning a paycheck, and that most of what most people do with their day is actually pretty unimportant and unnecessary, and that both they and society as a whole would probably be better off if they were doing things that mattered, that they loved and cared about? A lot of us figure this out when we’re in our teens or our twenties, if we ever figure it out at all.

Now imagine you saw all of this and understood it when you were eight years old.

I didn’t figure that out at eight years old. For me it was probably more in my twenties, and even then I’m not sure if I had those conscious thoughts. But I was never keen on ‘having a career’, that’s for sure.

David Graeber published his essay on Bullshit Jobs in 2013, and then it became a book. Regarding work, there’s probably many people now who see it like that — that most of what people do day in day out is quite meaningless.

So, this is a widespread challenge now, not only that of some round pegs. We are all in this mess together. Why are so many of us doing such meaningless stuff? And how can we change it?

Coming back to an earlier point, I would argue that the troubles that ‘child prodigies’ tend to get into, are actually one sign of something being wrong with modernity and the way we live now. They are a symptom. A pathology, as Hillman calls it in the book I wrote about last time. A pathology that points to something.

I will write more about that next time.

It makes me feel uneasy, because I find it difficult to let go of depression - or perhaps, rather the idea that depression plays a huge role in my life and will always continue to do so. It might be a weird case of Stockholm Syndrome. It has been a companion for so long — and when it wasn't there, the fear of it —, what might a life without it even look like?

The thing that for me personally has come out of the Geek Mental Help Week is that I gradually realised how well (although not necessarily always happy) I have been recently. This was not, because I read other people's articles and thought "They are so much worse off than me". It was rather all the stuff I scribbled down and didn't publish in the end. At the same time, when I was failing to get my article together, the old panic — and I get this panic a lot— resurfaced again. I was scared that I might have actually triggered a bout of depression by focusing so much on it, and it would turn into a prolonged period of depression, and eventually major depression.

(The next bit is a record of some experiences from my 20ies, skip if not interested in that)

I had a few of those in my teens and twenties. For example, a very dark month during my time as an ERASMUS student in Pisa, which was otherwise the happiest year during my studies. One day, I sat on the lawn in front of the leaning tower, and was struck by how my life had become just as wonky as that tower. The German term for crazy - "verrückt" - literally means "shifted". I thought how apt that word was. My reality had shifted, it was as if I was living in a different dimension, and I could not find my way back to what felt normal and familiar. I also remember bumping into some people in the canteen during lunchtime, and finding I could just not coordinate anymore the necessary parts and processes to properly say "Hello". The muscles, my voice, my motivation - I could just not get them to play together in a proper fashion.

Or that time when I joined an acting group. I'd been meant to play a leading role, but decided against it when dates of some of the performances clashed with an excursion I wanted to do at university. Instead I became 'assistant to the director'. Except I was not much help at all, had no initiative, and was more of a burden than assistance, despite spending loads of time at the rehearsals. Instead I smoked like a chimney. I often felt almost paralysed and started calling this state my 'strait-jacket'. When I helped at the performances, I remember being almost completely mute and at some point I thought: At least, if somebody else is feeling insecure and not good about themselves, it might make them feel better when they see me. Sort of, "if you are no good, you can still serve as a bad example". That was really the only use I could find for myself!

But I did not get professional help during those two (and previous) episodes, I somehow came out again. In Italy, one day I suddenly started feeling this rage, not directed at anyone in particular, just rage. And then I gradually got better. In the second case, I had a meltdown where I ended up crying in the director's arms. Again, very gradually came out of it. And then I was an actor in the next play, and had the time of my life! Just neglected my thesis a bit, mmh.

The first time that I got help was after I'd fallen in love with a PhD student at the place where I did my Master's thesis, and it didn't work out. I had shared a 'transcendental kiss' with him once (it really was that, and for him too, I know that!), but mostly tried to 'act cool', while at the same time I started to believe it was my destiny to be with this man. I accumulated all kinds of 'evidence' for this, too. And we did get quite close to.. okay, let's leave that. And then, well, he went off to South America, but came back a year later for his viva. I knew he had to come back, and I waited for him, and I waited for him to realise that he loved me. So much arrrrrgggggggghhhhhhhh. If I could tell my twenty-something-old self just one thing, if I could tell any girl just one thing: DO NOT WAIT FOR A MAN (unless I mean there are valid reasons, like you are already together and waiting for him to come out of hospital or something). DO YOUR OWN THING.1

I didn't very much do my own thing at all. I spent a whole year after leaving university, hanging around. Among the few things I got myself to do was once working for the post-office, and once writing an article for the local pages of a Munich newspaper (I thought I could become a science journalist eventually; but I only managed to write one article about genetically modified tomatoes). I met the PhD guy again, when he invited everyone (including me) to a pub after his viva, on which occasion he uttered the unforgettable words: "I don't love you. I could never love you". (He could be quite dramatic, just as me). That was when this whole world that I had built up in my head, collapsed. And a month later, I collapsed, too. One night, I could not sleep at all, and it felt like I had pins and needles all over my body, while my mind was completely numb. The next day I went to my parents' house. It was my mum's birthday. When she walked across the lawn to greet me, I cried and just pointed to my head. - I stayed at my parents' house for some weeks. I got to see a doctor and was prescribed Amitriptyline, and when that stopped working after a while, Fluoxetine. I got therapy, too, and eventually started crawling back out of the hole..

I've not had it as badly anymore since then. I just know I never want to go back there. That's why I sometimes get a panic when low moods persist for a bit. Perhaps it is the panics that keep me from getting it.

Depression versus Crisis

There's one thing I am not quite sure about. Because, you see, up till now, I was thinking: I keep having bouts of depression.

I just started describing what happens then, but find there's no point in going on too much about it. Because in a way I probably feel a bit ashamed about what triggers these bouts, when there are people who have real problems, like losing somebody they love. What is a kind of confidence crisis, where I suddenly believe I am an inadequate person, against that? And yet, they do happen. They follow a certain pattern, and I get distraught, I cry, I have negative thoughts. When my husband comes home, he helps me - challenges the thoughts and otherwise is there while I 'go through' the crisis. As for the negative thoughts, reading David Burn's book (which I believe is the best book you can read about cognitive distortions) has helped a great deal, but there are moments when all the insights I've gained are flushed away in one big wave of all-too-familiar thoughts and emotions.

The question is, what is meant by the term 'depression'? Robert Sapolsky says in his lecture on depression: "Right off the bat, we have a semantic problem". He then goes on to make a distinction between 'everyday depression' (that we all experience every now and then), 'reactive depression' (somebody reacts badly to something, is impaired for a few weeks, then gets out) and 'major depression' (somebody reacts badly to an event, slides into low mood, and weeks, months later has still not got out).

Elsewhere I have read that depression can last any amount of time, sometimes just half an hour, and there was no distinction made between different types. So, I will just make a distinction here for myself: Depression which is also a biomedical condition, versus a crisis with depressive symptoms. Or, in short: Depression versus Crisis.

Because, you see I do keep getting these crises, and they follow a certain pattern. And they are problematic in some ways, in what they prevent me from doing, and in keeping me 'locked down' in an unhelpful thinking pattern. But can I call them depressions? - And might there not be a way to challenge them, and make them become less frequent? Also, there is actually a part of me that can come across as quite confident. What if I managed to focus more on that?

And then there is this: Like, I am convinced, a lot of other people, I am so bogged down in things, and feel the pressure of all the things I am supposed to do, that often it can be difficult, to just feel happy or even just okay for a while, when in reality, there would be enough reason to do so.

On Halloween night, just after I had submitted my — I think now, pretty strange — post for Geek Mental Help Week, I kept feeling so calm. And suddenly there was another, very powerful, feeling that I had not known before. I can't quite describe it. It was beautiful. Like some sort of veil had been lifted from me. And I just felt well.

Since then I think: What if I could indeed give depression up? What if it was - by now (and for now) - my choice?

Coping strategies

So, this is a brief summary of the things that helped me, and keep helping me:

Acceptance

There are various different aspects to this:

• Accept that your current experience is what it is.

• Accept yourself fully

• Even accept your inner critic (before you tell it politely, but firmly, to shut up: "I know you mean well, I have heard you, now please go." - ha, I only just remembered this; I don't really do this. But I will do now!)

• Accept that other people behave in ways that irritate you, or that you might find hurtful. Try not to immediately criticise them, but understand that there are reasons for them acting like that that you might not know of.

I could go on. By far the most important thing though, is to accept yourself, and develop self-compassion. You cannot be kind to others, if you are not first kind to yourself. This is such a simple rule, and yet it took me so long to come across it, and still longer to make any real progress with it.

Find out what makes you feel good, do more of it

I once saw a tweet that said something like this: "Three most important factors for good mood: Good sleep, exercise, meditation". Recently, I have managed to have a better sleeping pattern (although it's pretty much down the drain tonight). And I started to go running. The latter is probably the external factor that has helped by far the most in my case.

Likewise, the advice could be: Find out what doesn't make you feel good, do less of it. But I am not good at that at all so far! I want to try and do that though. For example, not spend so much time on the computer when I am not working.. And have boundaries between different aspects of my life. When I am with the children, I want to be with my children, not start writing emails from my phone. When I cook, I stick with the cooking, and don't go to the computer inbetween to check emails and Twitter.. As I said, I have not been very good with this so far, but then I was maybe never as aware of all this as I am now.

Mindfulness and CBT

Probably, the single most helpful thing for me has been Mindfulness and meditation. Be present with whatever you are experiencing (see 'Acceptance' above). Recognise that your emotions, and your thoughts, are just passing events. This is a very short but ultimately of course insufficient summary. You have to really experience it, to feel the benefits of this approach.

I have not specifically had any CBT (Cognitive behavioural therapy) recently, but would count the David Burns book mentioned above as such. And it really did help, too, and still helps when I remember doing it, to discover how certain thoughts and beliefs you have, are distorted.

I just realised that what is missing from this list, is what many others have put first: "Talk about it". It is missing from my list, because I have already for a long time been able to talk about it. But, of course, it is helpful. Although there is caveats to this. You might feel, you can't keep going on about it all the time, you don't want to become a burden. Also, talking might not always help as much as you'd have hoped. Still, if you never talked to anybody about it, if you just cannot 'sort it out' by yourself anymore it is important to do that, rather than suffer in silence.

See also "Resources" below.

Can I help others?

I'd hope so.

And I'd hope that writing this all down, in whatever convoluted ways, might help someone besides me, too. I also hope that the Geek Mental Help Week, well - helped. What I can see coming out of it: People feeling less alone, and seeing mental illness as less of a weakness (as some successful and well-known figures in the web industry talked about theirs). Also: Pointing out how helpful talking can be. How helpful psychotherapy can be.

For me, there is a wider, almost political dimension to this: If we don't just 'medicate the problem away' and recognise that it is not just a medical condition, as the so often quoted broken leg is, we might be better able to change the conditions that make us depressed in the first place. - What I mean: If it was just this illness that comes out of the blue, and you just take some drugs and it goes away again; then nobody might start to question why so many people suffer from it, and ask themselves if there's something we can change.

If we manage to accept that we don't always have to be productive, if we collectively managed to move away a bit from the maniacal pace at which the tech industry is moving. If we recognised that there is no point trying to learn all the new things, putting yourself under that pressure. If instead we managed to fully accept ourselves, with all our 'shortcomings', that would mean that we'd have more time to think, to properly see things, and, as was said in one of the contributions to Geek Mental Help, to properly see each other. And we might not be so easily manipulated by corporate interests.

Or you could put it this way, perhaps: To fully accept yourself is a revolutionary act. - I am sure somebody must have said that before me!

Resources

- Robert Sapolsky video

"It's a biochemical disorder with a genetic component with early experience influences where somebody can't appreciate sunsets."

- The Mindful Way through Depression
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/112588.The_Mindful_Way_through_Depression

- Feeling Good by David Burns
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46674.Feeling_Good
 
Self-Compassion / Self-Acceptance
- Self-Acceptance project: http://live.soundstrue.com/selfacceptance/
- Lovingkindness by Sharon Salzberg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38215.Lovingkindness