I don’t remember my death. I don’t remember my birth either, so there’ some kind of symmetry there.

When thinking back, I sometimes try to find moments when I was alive, thinking that obviously, I must have died after that. But it’s not that simple.

What exactly does it mean to be alive? I have that image in my head of the newborn child, screaming and making everybody aware of it’s presence, but then again - it didn’t start living in that moment, it just changed it’s way of being alive. Quite visibly, like a butterfly crawling out of its cocoon. The butterfly was alive also before that happened, and the baby was so as well, before birth.

I’m thinking that dying may be similar: not clearly happening at one particular point in time, but rather through one or more changes to the way of being alive. Gradually shifting away from anything we normally call living.

Like leaves falling from the trees in the autumn. When exactly do they stop being alive? They began as buds, unfolded, breathed, and then less of that - some day, they fell off the tree. Now detached from their origin; are they then immediately dead? A baby also detaches from its origin, and that’s when we claim that it comes to life.

I’m not a leaf. I’m not a baby. I’m not a raindrop or anything else that is seemingly easy to explain and yet, endlessly difficult to determine the temporal extend of.

Temporal extend is always difficult to determine - you start somewhere and end somewhere, by your definition. Whatever you are dealing with did, however, exist in some form before that, and it continues to exist in some form after.

A blacksmith creating a sword will start by heating some iron, and from the start it isn’t a sword - but after a bit of heating and hammering, it is already partly a sword. The blacksmith decides when it is done - when the creative process has completed, and the iron has become a sword. One blacksmith may have one definition of done, another blacksmith another definition. A person watching the process may decide along the way, that now it’s a sword, even if the hammering continues.

An archeologist digs out the sword from the earth in which it has been hidden for thousands of years. It is still a sword, just not new. Rusty, maybe broken. Nonetheless, a sword.

I am also rusty and broken, though not yet in the ground. I was never a sword, never a raindrop, never a leaf. Whatever I was, I still am, just not new.

But something bothers me.

I wonder if a fallen leaf had a continuous life? The sword certainly didn’t, being used and forgotten several times, and the raindrop was shaping, falling, getting absorbed, but possibly with some amount of steadiness along the way.

My life, in contrast, consists of moments, most of them not connected, possibly not even part of the same life1. Like different glass splinters, no longer in a frame but in a pile - perhaps once part of the same window, perhaps not. It is difficult to tell, and nobody would ever bother trying to find out. They don’t care about the splinters - nobody does. If at all, only to get them away, seeing only negative value in them.

I feel that when moving around in reality. Talking to people, who don’t see a complete person. At a job interview, for instance, with some questions asked, but the answers not understood as part of a person – only as fragments. They don’t see the full window, only the splinters. And they don’t care.

Society treats me by individual splinters, when something I’m said to have done or not decides how a lot of things proceed. Again, not the full window, just a splinter.

At some point in time, I broke, if I ever was in one piece. The solution was then to replace me with a new window, and even though one or more splinters from the broken me could fit into a new context, they were treated as broken, never taken seriously, never valuable.

Again replaced, thrown out, not valued.

I remember – or maybe I just see one of the splinters of my memory telling me – how there was a time when broken things were thrown out but people were kept. Even the splintered ones. Now it all goes in the bin.

At times, someone, for a moment, sees something in one of the splinters they believe is valuable – but they see a reflection, typically, of themselves, and when they understand that it is not me, they throw me and the splinter out. It can happen in a moment. From end to end – the journey of being seen as valuable to being thrown out.

Often, I’m ghosted. That’s a plague of the present time, I know, but to me, it has been like that during half of my life. So, maybe I died at that time? When I quit a job to go with my own company, ignoring all the warnings from people who insisted that I was not capable of doing it, I was not in the same league as those who did such things. “It will go wrong” they said, after which they did all they could to make their prediction come true.

At least from that moment, I was a ghost to most people in business life. They still see me as one. But I remember many episodes, also earlier, where I was not really part of life. Others lived, and perhaps I was allowed to be there, but I was considered a stranger. I was probably often tolerated, for some obscure reason, and just as often not. Never liked.

Moving to Sweden accelerated everything, as I wrote about once. That looks like fiction, even a poetic kind, but it’s a true image, just abstracted a bit with a model photo:

Sweden is the ghosting country par excellence. People here are masters in ignoring others, pretending that they don’t exist. And also masters in keeping doing things in a certain way, no matter the circumstances. Like robots.

When even robots ignore me, it must mean that I’m not here? But they ignore each other as well, making this place a very weird place.

At times, the robots smell blood and start behaving truly nasty. A program in them tells them to be mean to people with problems, leading to homeless people being set on fire in their sleep, for instance, and super-fast and hard-handed processing of dept collection. As I have written about previosly, they also issue threats for throwing away garbage in a way they see as wrong on the surveillance cameras.2

Free World Dream

Whatever Happened to Privacy, Decent Behavior, and Respect Between Humans?

I was very upset last evening, due to MKB having sent me a letter, that I found in my physical mailbox while on the way to the shopping center in the evening – with an accusation, a conclusion, and a threat. According to their video surveillance in combination with their electronic key system, they could say that I h…

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a year ago · 3 likes · 5 comments · Jorgen Winther

They don’t see the human inside, treating people as if they were robots. Which, of course, they may be.

People without problems are ghosted, and those with problems are put on fire.

But the world is bigger than Sweden, and I feel how I and other ghosts are not noticed at all in an even bigger perspective – becoming increasingly invisible in a world of insane information collection. Spied upon, but neglected. I almost like it when yet another company or organization, like so many today, emails me to tell that they miss me – so, please, would I buy something from them? Hurray! Someone doesn’t see me as a ghost – but as a wallet.

Always, I’m being treated like just a fraction of a person. Always just a splinter of that full frame I may once have been. Always with disgust and complaints, and always with any lack of interest in the full me. Always as someone who doesn’t belong, and who can be ignored.

Being a humanist, I can say that this is not compliant with any scheme for humanism. But which level of compliance is there for a ghost? Maybe the overall scheme in this world, when treating each others as only fractions of people, is meant to bypass any human considerations – because, it is purely transactional. It is not about you – not all of you, that is. Don’t take it personal.

Humanism is for persons only, I suppose. And humans. Not ghosts. And not those piles of glass splinters that nobody sees the value of – the remains of broken people.

Of course, there’s something completely wrong in using a stock photo to illustrate that there are real people behind lots of the stuff you see on a place like Substack.

Because, what is a stock photo? If it’s not made my AI, which is something I try to avoid using, but you never know – AI photos sneak in everywhere, so some of them could be – then, at least, it’s mostly staged. Hence, it’s not real.

But then again. The people in a staged photo are real people, and each of them has a background, a life, and a head full of thoughts about everything in life, just like the writers on Substack.

In that way, it sort of fits: there’s a facade, and that’s what most people see, and then it goes no deeper – until you spend a little time on making it happen.

I have, recently, thought about how I perhaps tended to see people here as an expression – a carefully crafted image of a persona that could become popular and attract likes, views, and comments, and perhaps also paid subscribers.

But when thinking like that, I felt that something was missing in my evaluation of the world. Because, even though the Internet seems to be full of fakes and personas, there are some real people behind or inside. Just like the stock photos.

Maybe I’m a bit afraid of seeing that, though. There is a memory that has been haunting me for many years, making me feel that I want to apologize, but can’t.

It was in Thailand, on a round trip, and we, the bunch of tourists, arrived in a mountain village in a couple of large busses, for a couple of hours invading the private space and authentic life of the villagers, making them museum artifacts or zoo animals for a moment. Their advantage was, as the guide explained it (with other words), that they were a very original people who hadn’t seen much of the modern civilization, but with tourists appearing, they could earn some money that could allow them to do things, buy things, that they otherwise couldn’t. We helped them become modern, wealthier people.

She didn’t say that this was at the cost of their privacy, integrity, and happiness. But as I walked around a bit with my big camera, that I always had around the neck, always ready for that next magnificent shot, whenever a situation appeared, I came away a bit from the rest of the flock. On purpose, because I didn’t want to make photos of tourists, but of something real – something behind that touristic expression, that lineup of “original” personas that had appeared near the group of tourists to dance a bit, and whatever they were doing, and sell souvenirs.

And there, walking between buildings behind the main show, there was a young woman walking with a small child in her arms, talking to it, smiling, and the child was laughing back at her. It was a beautiful moment for the two, and I felt with them, that beauty, that emotional situation – I lifted up my camera, zoomed in, and made a shot. And a fraction of a second later, the woman saw me. She looked hurt, her smile faded, suddenly making her look sad and a bit frightened, and with all right. I had stolen her moment with her child. It was theirs, privately, until I took it.

I didn’t get closer, the two quickly went away and I was left with a feeling of being a stalker, a monster who had, effectively stolen their souls – even though I don’t think they had that kind of primitive ideas about cameras. I think, to be honest, they felt more or less the same as when we, today on the Internet, can’t have anything of our own – it all becomes public, or it all becomes stolen and abused by Big Tech and everybody else. The Internet, and social media, can be seen as a “stalkers’ paradise”, where people can spy on each other all the time. Only, those two didn’t have that much of their own, not a bunch of daily posts in a hectical exchange of information – they had that moment, only.

No wonder why most people try to be anonymous and create a fake persona to represent their wish to share something – stories, quick thoughts, or photos. Or to just feel a connection with other people by sharing memes or jokes, or anything else, that can help create a moment of community. They want to share, but they don’t want to give away their souls to stalkers.

So, that photo, long ago, along with many others during the years, sort of assisted in pushing me into an understanding that getting too close is bad. We don’t have a right to know the deepest feelings of others, no right to take part in their emotions, or their precious moments.

So, on Substack, all the writings were – by me – taken at face value, literally. Whatever facade the writers wanted to present, I accepted as their expression, their artistic persona.

However, that also made me understand that I was probably being seen the same way, and for all of us, it made true, deep, connection to whatever was said, impossible. We could see what was there, and we could react with a “I feel with you”, or similar, but there was still distance.

Now, I am not going to argue that the distance needs to be shortened and we all need to move closer to each other. I think that the above should explain why – we cannot function that way as humans. Privacy means private, shared with a few, selected people only, as we decide to. Not the full openness for everybody in the world to take part.

But still, some of the posts are deeper. And some of the writers and other artists do, obviously, tell about something they want to share, something of a deeper nature.

To see that, it is necessary to read more of their posts, their public biographies, and whatever else they are eager to share, and be careful to see the human in it.

I still don’t want to be that stalker I was when making that village photo, but I want to allow for people to tell their honest story and be understood. I want them to be real humans, not just personas, when that’s what they aim for.

And that has, recently, made me pay more attention to what people write – and also to look at more of their stories, not just those that I accidentally stumbled upon.

What I have discovered, is that the old idea, often said but perhaps not so often truly understood – that everybody carries a burden you don’t know about – is very true.

People have seen things, experienced things, and are perhaps right now struggling with things, that often are much more demanding in many ways, than whatever small problem I may see and want to talk about.

It of course affects the relevance of my small problems in their eyes, and it is not strange if they may not feel able to pay attention to those. But still, many of these amazing people actually do that anyway. They look out to offer their support, a virtual comforting hand on a shoulder, a smile and an expression of their belief in you, and all that becomes so much more impressive when understanding how they themselves could probably need it even more.

I still don’t want to be a stalker, but I want to lift up myself a bit and become a better person who sees the needs of these good people, so that I can give them something back – or forward, whatever is the situation.

Considering the often impersonal and somewhat flimsy nature of the Internet, I could imagine that this will help improving it a bit. My little corner of the world is not significant at all, but so could every grain of sand on the beach say, and yet, they all are significant – not individually, but without each of them, there wouldn’t be a beach. Who knows which grain can be omitted and which not, to still see that same beach. In my perspective, they are all important.

Next to the needs of all these real people, there’s also the aspect of what they can and want to give to the world. Apart from their support, as described, they have stories to tell. Perhaps the stories are also supporting, but they can be anything – expressed by real people, for real reasons, all great reading for the one who tries to see their value.

It is difficult to not feel humble in the company of all those great people, who are also great storytellers, each in their way, and who together shape the world we see – generously opening their minds and offering their stories and their support to others who need it.

Hi, I’m a writer. Or, that is, I was. Until Artie came. Now I’m a prompter.

You have to admit that he’s at the top of the food chain, a big achievement by nature, more or less, and able to survive by simply eating everybody that comes in his way.

He’s the image of success, as we know it.

You can’t win over him. Whenever you write something on your own, it takes time, and during that time, Artie will have done it a hundred times. So fast, despite that he’s really a huge monster, living in the shadows himself, in the dungeons of the data centers. You know, those that use all our drinking water for cooling and consume several times the amount of energy on Artie, than we use on everything else in the world – and from there, over-shadowing the rest of us.

He’s growing out of the constraints of our planet, and will soon move into space as well! One million satellites, across which he will live and eat sunshine, becoming an umbrella that surrounds the planet. That’s quite amazing. As he’s in the need of huge amounts of energy, he’ll need a huge area of solar panels, so that he by then also literally can over-shadow all of us.

We created him. We, the humans. Not me. Not you. Not most of the billions of people who are living in his shadows, from the dungeons, and from space. No, we, the pension savers and workers, who believe in Big Tech and their abilities to make us wealthy some day, when we retire. We from the edge of the job market, where we can’t freely put money aside but have to change them into contributions to the investment schemes that make such as Artie possible.

We create all kinds of monsters this way, together – true socialism, almost, if it hadn’t been for a few people becoming multi billionaires or even trillionaires from it, and the rest of us, strangely, ending up living modest lives when retiring early, due to Artie taking over our jobs.

When Artie was just an egg in a nest with hundreds of others, we never knew how big he would become. Most of these eggs never hatch in the first place, and the rest, starting out as just tiny monsters, quickly eat each other until there are only a few left. For a while, these will then run around and eat all kinds of other creatures, while thriving in their web – each of them strangely covering the whole world. And, eventually, they will meet, and merge, and eat each other. And spawn more monsters.

But we all cheer at them when we see them – me too, even though they reduced me to a prompter. I pray to them, and especially Artie, the biggest of them all, the monster of monsters, and they do what I ask for. Its magic! Its divine!

We better cheer. Because, those who don’t, are at risk of ending up in a bad situation. The inquisition was big in the middle ages, but nowadays, we just abandon people, which is a much more efficient way of muting them. If anybody believes that writing something themselves will be a match to what Artie can do, we’ll just freeze them out. They will freeze in the hell they have created for themselves, just because they didn’t want to pray to Artie.

Irony is the trademark of nature! Once, the monsters were hiding from us under the bed or in the dark corners of the closets – now we must hide from the monsters instead. Or pray to them. Whatever, but they no longer need to fear neither newspapers nor vacuum cleaners. They are now on top of the food chain. You have to admit that. And especially Artie.

A thing, though, that Artie and the pension funds, and the billionaires, I suppose, didn’t think of: He’s now so big that he overshadows most things. Well, they know that, but the consequence seems to escape their attention: that he can’t see what lives under him – in his shadow.

So we, the wannabe non-prompters, the non-believers, the non-prayers, the non-prey – can have a calm life in the shadow of the beast. In a strange sense protected by the monster, as anyone approaching our safe hideout will be seen by him, but we will not.

And from here, from the shadow of Artie, we will write. We will again become writers. Me too. Secretly, for a closed forum of readers, as we can’t move outside of the shadow, fearing both Artie and his followers, the modern, freezing inquisition. But free to the maximal extent this is possible now, in the age of Artie.

It happens in fashion: what was hot and made you shine a few years ago will look hopelessly outdated now.

It happens in every industry: your old toaster, car, TV, whatever may look like it needs to be renewed, even if it still does exactly what you bought it to do; it still works as it has always done, and was always meant to do.

It happens on the Internet: certain websites become popular, and then, a few years later, they die out and may end up closing completely.

It happens all around us, because we – the humans – are in constant movement. It may be movement on the spot, when seen from the outside – I imagine that aliens visiting us in their UFOs with some years in between may not notice such a big difference as we, ourselves, think that is there – but we can’t see it from the outside, and from the middle of it, we feel that the world is moving fast forward.

It leaves a lot of clothes behind. It still works but is no longer being use. And a lot of toasters, cars, etc., are scrapped and melted into new ones, or are simply dumped into a still unoccupied hole in the ground somewhere, for future archeologists to enjoy finding.

Books, of course, are abandoned by the millions: a few years ago, everybody had a bookshelf, with books in it. Now, almost nobody has that – so what happened to the books? Probably they circle around a bit, from the attics to the garage, to the dumpster. But they are not being read anymore, if they ever were, and now they end up being burned or used as landfill.

What is more interesting, however, is what happens to the lost projects on the Internet.

The net is so old now, that many websites have been made by people who are no longer with us on this planet, and some of those sites still exist. Sometimes they are taken over by others, so the sites are still alive, but often, the sites die with the owners.

When a website dies, it may be in a place that keeps it up. That’s what basically happens to our social media pages, that contain so much valuable information (for the social media companies, that is), so they will be reluctant to delete it. But also the relatives of the deceased profile owners may want to keep it running, as a memory.

Other kinds of websites may be closed and deleted when the paid-for period is running out, but if it is in a place where webpages can be had for free, it may just stay there.

And then there is a special case. Maybe nobody died, actually, but they just ran out of enthusiasm.

I have seen that a lot the last few days, where I have been combing the Internet for Esperanto pages, as part of making my new Substack about Esperanto – finding out that many of them were enthusiastically maintained during a period, only to be left behind at some point in time, so that they are now still there, still owned by the local Esperanto club, for instance, but nothing has happened there since 2016, or 1994, or whatever.

At times, the front page is being updated, but a lot of what is behind is getting older and older, and is, for instance announcing upcoming events that actually took place many years ago, or linking to other sites that have long ceased to exist.

Having made many websites myself throughout my life, I fully understand what is going on.

Sometimes, you get fascinated by a topic, want to tell the world about it, and you do it, see some interest, feel motivated to do more – and then, after some years of spending a lot of your life on this, you are dragged away from it. You may get married, get a new job, run into a technical problem with the web hosting provider – losing your login, being unable to upgrade to more megabytes, or whatever it could be. And while the site updates are laying low, the readers disappear.

That by itself may be completely demotivating, so you decide to just leave tha page behind, but even if you try getting it up and running again, you may not be able to attract the old readers, or any new ones, so you give up.

Organizations are popping up now and then, especially when there’s a wave of something in fashion, and they work enthusiastically with a lot of things, but gradually, they will drop out – for millions of reasons, and sooner or later, the rest of them decide that it is not the same as it was, so they stop. But for old times sake, they keep the website running. Maybe some others will appear, who are interested in taking over?

Youth departments of organizations are driven by people who become too old to be in the youth department, but the new youth isn’t interested in the topic in the same way, to the same extent, so they don’t want to maintain the website.

This has happened during about 50 years now. Every day something is started enthusiastically, and every days something is left behind.

So, the world is now full of abandoned websites, and dead links to websites that were even closed down completely. Many web apps, that could do something on the screen for you, no longer work, because the technology they used, be it Flash or Java Applets, or anything else, simply isn’t supported by modern web browsers.

Now, we have a huge consumption of energy and “rare earth minerals” and other stuff to keep the Internet up and running. All this abandoned enthusiasm on the Internet isn’t exactly contributing to minimize the consumption of that.

Also – we all keep getting confused when finding a website and then only after spending several minutes there notice, that it was last updated 20 years ago, and nothing there is still valid. Names, addresses, even books or other things for sale – nothing works anymore.

So, while the old clothes get burned, the old toasters get melted into new ones – what will ever happen to old websites? Or will they keep accumulating forever, until there’s more abandoned stuff on the net than active?

Will the Internet drown in memories?

From my diary:

Another day waking up later than I wanted to, and still having slept less than I needed. And being tired, with a fluctuous pain in the belly, I really want to just relax – perhaps in a hot bath, or even by going out for a walk. But I feel locked up in the trap of life, where there’s something big hanging over my heads, a task that I must do, and some problems I must work on solving.

While a moment of focus on some easier tasks, learning this or that, brings me a relief for a moment, it doesn’t fix any overall problems in the short term. But it does bring me a lot of value in the longer term. For instance, being able to speak French, and to tell people that I can, may gain me some extra points in different contexts, but mostly, it will simply help me feel that I am capable of moving forward into becoming someone better than I was before learning that.

Learning how to play the flute, or any other instrument, will make me confident and raise my social level, inherently, even if most of the people I know wouldn’t want to show any appreciation for the skill – but there are other people in the world, and some people will appreciate it. No matter the topic: knowing something well, or being good at something, will find its followers.

And I can write about it, perhaps make videos on YouTube where I play the flute and other instruments, and while this likely, as YouTube has developed, would bring me two likes and five followers, or something else small, it would give me a confidence boost bigger than most other things I could imagine. It would bring me several steps up a ladder of appreciation in the society, even if that’s only happening in my own head.

And that confidence is needed. The world thrives on it, and job application forms now even ask me to describe “fun facts” and “super powers” – so, I should better have something to tell when being asked such questions.

We have a society now where almost everybody is automatically ruled out in most situations. Public systems of any kind take a stance in not approving people for inclusion, and only if the arguments and evidence are strong enough, then people might be included in that schema, for now. Until they can be thrown out again. Businesses decide who they want as customers, and throw out those they don’t see fit. Social media sort people into an A-team and a B-team, and then all the “untouchables” who are allowed to watch, but who are not considered part of the game.

In such a society, it is important that I at least know by myself that I have some skills. Even if they are difficult to bring in play in social contexts. But for myself, it can help me feel that I am worth something. Not to speak about the actual joy it brings to learn new things, and to practice and become better. And, not the least, to actually exercise the new skill. I would really enjoy playing a piece on the flute, and to be able to apply dedication and passion to it, to make it a great performance, even if only I will hear it.

Now, is the meaning of life to always rush, always try to fulfill some artificial needs or wishes, often imposed by others?

Or is it to find a path that makes you thrive? Every day, if possible.

Stress and worries over problems that have been super-imposed on you will not make you happy, that’s for sure, but can you really allow yourself to spend time on things that are solely for your own sake, and not even leading to any immediate win, not to a new job or anything else that you could actually need right now?

To be quite frank, I find that society is off when it cannot see the immediate value of being content, resting in one-self, etc., by growing skills, knowledge, and all other kinds of understanding. Thinking about philosophy, imagining how the world might really function, and diving into those topics discovered along the way that seem interesting to learn more about – that should be appreciated by everybody.

But there is an overall puritan view on life as being something to dedicate to a purpose, no matter if you’ll have your soul with you in this.

Fact is, that if you are already happy for knowing and being able to do those things that fascinate you, you will be a much bigger asset for any company – also if none of that will be directly useful at work. Because it will make you feel good about yourself, and that is useful, in all contexts.

I also believe that learning things will lead to more respect for others who can do that. Playing that flute, for instance, isn’t as straight-forward as it might look to people who never tried. So, working on it, learning, practicing, and seeing for yourself how difficult this really is, may make you feel more humble and respectful toward those who can do it well.

Only when you have tried it yourself, you’ll be able to appreciate how much dedication, time, and enthusiasm it takes to become good. And even if you’ll possibly never become that good at playing the flute, it will develop you in other ways – your mentality, your social sense, and your respect for people in general.

To take it a bit further: learning and doing things that are not for business, not for bringing you an income, and perhaps not for displaying your skills to anyone else than yourself, will probably make you a better person altogether.

That really must be an element of that “meaning of life”.

And it’s easy to get there, if you just want to. A book about Esperanto, I have, claims that setting aside just 20-30 minutes a day, but every day, will bring you far, fast. That thought is not new, but it becomes more and more correct, the more you practice it. 30 minutes a day during a year will be almost 200 hours of studying, which is enough to bring you to a reasonable, or at least visible skill level with most things, and who says you should stop after one year? Several years of this, and you’ll master the topic.

But more important. Those 30 minutes will be your sacred time. That time where you grow.

And you can, of course, grow several times a day, doing different things. So, both the flute, French, and Esperanto can become part of your life, take part in making you a better person, and, in any case make you feel good about life during all of those half-hours, every single day for the rest of your long and now happy life.

It has been fun, and it still is – and it has grown! So far, 45 articles have been put there, along with a clever mechanism for marking what you want to read later, share with others, or collect for some other reasons.

And newsletters have been added!

My little sanctuary will also get photos, but later, and it will get many more articles – so far, I have planned to move around 200 to there, which will take a bit of time. Plus write many new ones, of course.

Some additional information, not as articles but as static pages, is beginning to take shape too. Such things that it can be nice to know when otherwise being submerged into reading. And some links to practical places to know.

When building a website, suddenly all kinds of additional things must be done, apart from writing the articles: cookies must be handled, and the site must be registered with Google, from where all the other search engines get their data.

Trying to make the first few people go to the site and read something there, is a task in its own right, and it is much more difficult now than it was years ago, before social media monopolized the attention of people.

The exact shape and size of everything needs my attention, along with which colors to use, how to ensure that it all works and looks good on both a computer and a smartphone, and that also Google finds it usable, because, otherwise, they will not show it in the search results.

Well, lots of practical, technical things, plus marketing, and the decisions to make about what exactly the site should deliver to its users. What is valuable?

But, so far - All of Life XL is there, it works, most links and features there work (even though a couple not yet, and a couple others just in a diminutive way, for a start).

The first newsletter has been published and can be read online, if you didn’t get it in your email:

Weekly Life XL

And from the website, you can get your own subscription to it.

Another new article, next to those mentioned in the newsletter, is:

Photography in the 2020s – an Overview

The work continues, and more stuff will be added, the details fixed where needed, and, along the way, as mentioned, photos will be added, as a supplement to the articles, to allow for some stress-free time in an environment that you don’t need to leave while using it, and which will not pop up with all kinds of disturbances along the way.

You can read articles without registering, but using the bookmark feature does require it. Newsletters don’t need registration on the site, either – they have their own lists of subscribers.

Oh, and even though the photo for this post indicates a checkout desk, there isn’t any! You’ll pay absolutely nothing for using the site1. Ah, that is, you’ll probably pay attention to the great stuff there, but that’s on your own account ;)

You are welcome to drop in now and then and let me know what you think.

I have removed the comments section from the articles themselves, to allow for an undisturbed reading experience, but I may add something else, more discrete, when I have made up my mind up about what it should be. Until then, please just talk to me here, on Moments of Life, or send me a message through the site’s contact form.

Btw., I have used an AI agent for some of the design work and some of the text elements on the site itself – not the articles, which are written 100% by me.

Most of the AI stuff has been changed to my own manual style, and the rest probably will be as well. To be honest, I have a hard time understanding why people find AI so good. But it does make something quickly, so that there’s a starting point, and that can be valuable, I suppose.

On top of confusion and the magnificent help it led to, I have begun doing something.

Of course, it’s about writing – and the first article has been put there already, just now!

So, maybe you would like to follow the link, read the article, and look around a bit, sniffing in the smells of saw dust and welding wire? – While I’m still building something that will become useful, I hope.

Longing For Childhood – at All of Life XL.

Please remember to put on a hard hat when entering! Most of the interior is fixed with scotch and could fall down, and it will most likely be changed later, but for now, it helps indicate what will become of it all.

Currently, you’ll find comment fields there, but I’m still not sure if they should be there in the future, so, if you comment (and you are welcome to do that), it may be hidden or removed later – or maybe not, depending on what I decide is best for that place.

I am filling in some older articles, and that’s one of the main elements –I’m following ‘s suggestion of making a kind of library, and in such one, it matters that there are things to read – that the shelves are full of things to discover. It takes some time, and it will happen in parallel with all the other things going on, and with new articles being added as well.

My aim is then to try to make it all come alive, by making collections, overviews, summaries, and similar. But the XL site is for that deep dive. It will not be for the busy people. For those, I’ll maintain this site on Substack, renaming it to Moments of Life, so that it is clear that it is no longer an attempt to cover all of life.

The moments will be more emotional (thanks for that suggestions, !), and shorter – aiming at about half of my typical writing length of around 1200 words, so, 5-600 words as a goal (like this article). The XL articles, on the other hand, can become as long as you can imagine them – but they may not always end up like that: short is also allowed there.

And I will speak more directly into the community fragments that still exist on Substack, even if they, by large, are not for me – but that small bubble with people I have come to know, plus whoever else might enter along the way, will be the people in this, the reception of my “library” – thanks for reminding me that the world actually does exist, :)

And, as a third element, I am looking at what a regular or irregular newsletter could look like – what should be in it for it to be interesting, and how much work and regularity can I commit myself to.

The last bit is about art. I love art, and even though I have been painting and photographing during times, I’m not doing it right now. But I want to pick up at least the camera and go out to make some photos, so that they can become part of my big, virtual painting of life.

So, that’s it for an invitation to take a look at a building lot ;)

It’s quite amazing how life can unfold at times!

One moment, everything is confusing and chaotic – the next, a complete understanding of both problem and solution exists, and we know what it’s all about and what to do next.

Life sometimes surprises, and often, it can be difficult to fully grasp at the moment what actually happened – but after a bit of thinking, puzzling the pieces together, and seeing the big picture assembled for the first time, that feeling of amazement can appear.

What exactly happened yesterday?

I asked a question – a poll – because I was a bit lost. Didn’t know how to move on. And after a few moments, three great people - real friends - had all understood that I needed empathy and perspectives, reinforcement of memories, and a new goal – and they gave me that!

One virtually asked the question “haven’t we been here before?” - which we had, and we had philosophized about it and developed some fun and comforting theories about what we could do. He reminded me that we already had good memories about this topic.

The other saw what I was feeling and offered me agreement and also a hint to something in it all being not that bad - some hidden perspectives that would make me understand that there was something good in it all, if I just gave it a thought.

And the third knew that when losing track of, or the inspiration for, one goal, another may be what’s needed – “start envisioning a solution on this, bigger goal with more perspectives!”, was the general idea. It dragged me out of the confusion and into a constructive mode, suitable for an engineer at heart.

And there I was – suddenly, all my trouble seemed so far away. Yesterday became the first day of the future!

And I understood that I have at least three good friends who know exactly what I need to hear and how to back me up. Leading to some ideas that I now work with, which will become a room in which my worries can find a wall to hang on, so I don’t need to carry them around, and a window to see perspectives through, allowing me to keep elaborating on the new project.

I didn’t expect that to happen – now my life has been lifted a couple of floors, bringing me the overview that I needed. All of a sudden, on an otherwise ordinary Wednesday evening.

Bringing the dimensions together for a holistic understanding and a complete and covering solution. Brilliant! How lucky can one get?!

Thanks, friends! ❤️

For those who are curious: The solution will be revealed later, when I have brought it to a point where there’s something to show.

“All of Life” could have been named “All of Your Life”, to reflect what is there, deep inside every post.

Because, even though the writer (me) expresses everything out of their own thoughts, using their own words, trying to tell something that seems important, to the writer – the purpose is for this to be read by you, making your life somehow different.

It’s all about you.

Writing on Substack has become a challenge to me. I want to give you something that you like, and something you need, but the platform doesn’t work well anymore – it doesn’t bring the message to you. Or you are being distracted, perhaps, or not reading anything at all? Whatever the case, the articles are usually stuck with a few people only, and sometimes so few, that they count just one or two – or even none.

It’s connected with a general defect in the distribution mechanism: I have seen how new writers on Substack often get zero subscribers and zero reads of their articles. They are not being let in. It wasn’t like that a year or two ago, but now it is.

There seems to be an over-saturation of the platform. People have had enough of hopeful writers’ attempts to catch their attention, and now they are seeking that ultimate stuff – only – that will change their day.

No room anymore for giving attention to people who need that – no wish to make the writers happy. It really has become all about the reader – about you. And as important you may be, and surely are, I also want to get something out of it.

This makes me seriously consider if Substack is the right place to be, for me as a writer. But also, what exactly makes sense to publish – here or elsewhere.

What will work? What will give you the reading experience you are looking for? What will stand out from the overload? What will allow me to become happy for delivering what you want?

I’m still not talking about paid contents, as this seems to be even harder to arrange. A recent post at Notes from one of the hard-working and popular people here, revealed that she has 13,000 subscribers now – a serious amount! But only 250 of those are paying. That’s a bit less than 2%.

Now, 2% may be a good number, and 250 paying subscribers are definitely more than none. She is successful, no doubt about that, and for a number of good reasons – especially, she gives her subscribers, paying or not, something they like to get. I believe it’s that simple.

But success is different for her and me, so I wouldn’t be able to do like here – I wouldn’t do it right if trying to copy her success. Because, I’m me, and even though it’s all about you, I have to give you something that I’m capable of giving – write something that I can write, for an audience that I can find. And smiling the way I can smile, etc. – the person behind the words seems to matter.

This means that “you” isn’t just anyone – it’s those particular people out there who want to read something that I’m capable of writing and who wouldn’t mind that it comes from me.

But what exactly is that? Where do our universes meet? I want to know!

Hence, a poll! 😁

During the life-span of “All of Life”, I have written about several topics, in several ways. If you wish, you can try (on a computer) to take a look at the front page of this Substack – https://life.inidox.com – to see what exactly is in each topic and which articles may inspire you. You may have read some of it earlier, or decided not to – whatever, it’s still there for you to judge1.

The contents have been divided in categories, which are not easy to navigate from the mobile app – they work better on a computer.

There’s an overview of the categories as well, at https://life.inidox.com/newsletters. Click on each to see articles in that category.

Which of these categories are interesting to you? We can discuss the individual articles later, but I’m trying at first to zoom into an overall topic that will be interesting to you if done right:

And, eh, no offense, but it seems to me that many of the readers on Substack are actively avoiding anything that has to do with how the world functions – or how well. They don’t want to hear about politics, don’t want to read anything that challenges the prevailing order (or disorder) – they simply want some kind of escape from life, not information or thoughts about it.

How would you describe your main motivation for reading anything on Substack?

And just to test my assumption from before – when deciding what to read, and what to skip, are you considering the immediate value for you only, or do you seek inspiration for your talks with friends, etc., i.e., your “tribe” – or perhaps seeking interesting writers to follow more than interesting reads?

What is your preferred way of getting the texts you want to read?

That’s it for now!

I hope you want to participate, so that I can learn something about you (statistically, as this is anonymous) and plan my writing accordingly.

The poll mechanism is more primitive than I remember it – I think it has been changed since I last used it – so, if it doesn’t allow you to tell what you want to tell, please feel free to add comments. You can also send me a direct message, if you prefer to tell something privately.

I’m in general considering making and focusing on a dedicated newsletter, sent out through a platform for that to your email inbox. Alternatively, a kind of online magazine, but without the social part that has more or less stopped working on Substack (Notes). Or, if I can see a useful way of doing it, perhaps a continued effort on Substack, but not if I won’t reach any readers here.

And some bonus questions for those who wish to discuss:

The last few months have seen many VIPs joining Substack. Do you prefer to read their thoughts rather than the thoughts of ordinary people? Is it by itself interesting that they are VIPs, or is it more important that they write something you are interested in? Does it matter how well anything is written, or is it all about the topic?

During the time with this Substack, there have been many great talks, many thoughtful comments, and some absolutely brilliant ideas being aired in the comments section of the articles.

It has been a privilege to see them coming in, and I will forever be thankful for all and every comment that was given.

Now I’m thinking about closing the Substack completely, and take it away from the surface of this planet (or wherever it actually is – in some cloud, I suppose).

So, if you want to keep some of the comments, maybe for your further work toward a Nobel Prize, which I’m not in doubt that many of you, the readers and commenters, deserve, then perhaps you should consider copying it before it’s gone.

I have not set a specific date for this, but it will be soon, so don’t wait too long.

What a month, it was, November 2024!

I thought at the time that things would move forward from there, escalating into ever higher numbers of readers, and huge amounts of views of the individual articles.

That was what the let-me-tell-you-how people on Substack claimed, and they were good at posting similar graphs as mine, and various other types, showing how amazingly successful they were – “and you can become that too! (with some consistency)”.

Now, some of the people who started here at the same time as me has escalated way ahead of me. Some of those I have been following from when we both had 10 subscribers and no readers for our posts, they now have several times the subscribers as I have, and curves that beat mine in every respect.

So, I tend to claim that I can not show you how to become successful.

After that good month, it felt like I couldn’t catch the attention of people like in the beginning. Had it been on Facebook or another typical social medium, it would have been at that time that I should start paying for readers, to keep everything going and not get stuck on a plateau.

I made another Substack, the Turning Life, plus some business stacks, the latter meant to attract potential customers for my technical writing and data analyst services.

Turning Life never took off. You can see the curve for it here:

At most, it had something like 1/10 of the traffic from A Rich Life/All of Life (which changed name along the way).

Both stacks fell drastically in popularity in the beginning 2025, and as my life became difficult and I had to put my focus elsewhere, it was easy to run away from Substack for a while, not publishing anything there. And social media never fails on that point: going away for a while means that all is lost.

In June 2025, I was again very active, mostly with All of Life, but it was impossible to attract very much attention to anything I did.

And when I then announced that I would now close down, there were hardly anybody noticing it. Only the handful of hardcore supporters I had here, reacted to it at all.

Looking at the graphs, I realize that it hasn’t been a full year yet – one month is still missing. I think the tendency is clear, though: I have lost. If there ever was a competition about becoming popular on this platform, I wasn’t even in the room where the podium was. I guess you could say, i wasn’t even told when they would announce the winner on TV. That’s how far I was from winning.

And why do I care?

When I started, I had some thoughts about this being or becoming kind of a portfolio platform, to which I could direct anyone interested in hiring me for writing – then they could see for themselves what I was capable of, and decide if it was suitable for their business.

I lost that. Nobody ever looked at this place to see how I was writing. Nobody cared at all.

I also thought, like I had done previously with Medium, that there would be a chance, over time, to start earning a bit of money here. It is necessary to understand that I have a very small economy these days, trying to catch a few dollars here, a few euros there, all of it together now, for a long while, very far from what I need to pay the bills.

I lost that too. It turned out that anyone earning just a small amount of money have many more subscribers than I have, and also such subscribers who kind of adore them, see them as gurus or special talents. Often, the paying subscribers hope to get a little stardust on them by being near a successful Substack-owner.

And then, as it appeared to me that I couldn’t use this place as a reference of any kind, and I couldn’t earn money on it, I thought that I could, at least, use it as a social platform, since people here seem to be more reasonable, more normal, than many of those on other platforms.

But, again, even though I have had some great talks with some of the readers here, which I appreciate very much, there isn’t a broad set of people with whom I can talk – it is again the handful of supporters.

And that was, of course, my win on all this. Getting in touch with a handful of people with whom I could have meaningful conversations.

I have written and posted maybe 200 articles (or maybe more) on Substack, spread over the different stacks, and it means, in a way, that each of you have got 40 articles each. With an average length of 1,000 words per article, this means that I have written a short novel, 40,000 words, for each of you, exclusively :)

Isn’t that great?!

Which other platform could call for so much engagement that I would consider doing that? But here, it has been a pleasure.

The first post was a first. I had put several things into one post, believing that this was what was expected from a “newsletter”. It really was very new for me, even though I had had the first stack for a long while, maybe a year or more, just without using it.

It looked like this (but with a different logo back then):

Somehow, however, a platform like this one doesn’t enjoy having me here. 13 likes on the first post, that’s quite good, but it never got much higher than that, and the first readers quickly vanished again.

I tried to be active and read, like, comment, etc., on several articles for each of those who visited my posts, but very few seemed to appreciate it, so, after a while, the reciprocity-model died out for me.

I tried getting into sharing recommendations, but very few returned with one when I recommended them. However, some did, and also some recommendations appeared at the others’ initiatives, so it worked somewhat, but not as I had expected.

And then, when we reached 10 months and everything looked like it was in a decline from an already low level, I decided to call it a day (see previous posts on this).

Looking around on the platform, and trying to use Substack’s search mechanism for people and stacks, reveals that people have come and gone by large. Very many stacks have 5–10 posts, with increasing intervals between them, and the last one was several years ago.

I thought, when I first started here, that it was because some people didn’t really want to write after all, or they had other obligations that took their time. But now I’m not sure about that. I believe that at least some, probably many, have felt that this was a hostile place.

I can see from the zero, one, or more rarely, two likes they have on their articles, and the complete lack of comments, that they didn’t manage to catch any attention at all. Often, they had a few likes on the first post, and then nothing after that. Perhaps Substack’s recommender-algorithm in play here, to help new writers get started.

You may have seen from some of my other posts, what I consider could be part of the explanation for some people becoming successful here, and others not. And it is not always a matter of how well they write. Sometimes, probably it is, but even the best written article in the world will get no likes if nobody knows that it exists.

For this, there is Notes. But Notes obviously works only for some people, not for all. It should be possible to write something there, or send a link to an article, and then see a number of reactions. But, for some of us, this just doesn’t happen. When the new statistics feature was made for Notes, I could see why: most had 4 impressions, or whatever it’s called there. Out of those, perhaps one had clicked on like, if I was lucky.

Nobody sees my posts on Notes, so it doesn’t matter what I write there: they wouldn’t know.

I have also mentioned that American society that rules the top position of most categories – the big names on Substack, who all have been invited, have been promoted, and even paid by Substack for being here. The dream about becoming popular on this platform is not real, and in particular not for those of us who are not already popular outside the platform, as this is something that seems to be noticed here, having a major impact on whether people want to read your posts or not.

Every single one of those top names earn millions on their writings here, and every single one of them wants extra money, from you, if you should be able to write a comment on their posts, which they’ll never read. None of them will ever read anything you wrote, anywhere. In fact, I believe that none of them actually are on the platform at all – they are just names, brands, being used to sell subscriptions.

All the rest of us are – with the words of Jeremy Clarkson, former host of the TV show Top Gear – plankton (this snipped taken from The Mirror), and even though he refers to protests (about getting fired from the BBC), it is still a quite good way of seeing some details of how a society works, including Substack:

Clarkson said: "The simple truth of the matters is this: Protest never works. Because we are all plankton.

"And the world is run by whales. Oh, you can be a big and important plankton but that doesn't make a jot of difference if a whale has decided to eat you up.

"You can get a million other plankton to dress up and wave banners but Mr Whale won't even notice."

Well, that was a status.

Going forward, as I have mentioned in the previous post, with the little goose pictured, I am writing mostly within some specific topics, and I honestly don’t expect that anyone cares. I have become very negative toward the possibilities of this platform, so I am simply just publishing there, on the new stacks, instead of keeping the writing at home, on my own computer only.

I know that some of what I write will be blocked and banned by most Americans, who really do not seem to be able to handle anything that could rock their boat. But I write it anyway – not to insult or scare anyone, but because I find that it is important for people on this planet to be able to talk about certain topics, for instance such as the world, as we know it, being in the process of going under.

It may be unpleasant to think about, but it can end up becoming a lot more unpleasant if nobody thinks about it.

Many people prefer to be entertained by something they have already seen before in their life, many times. Perhaps the reason for TV-series being so popular? Or other kinds of repeated shows on TV. If there is nothing new, the world feels like it is still the same old world. That may be a comforting feeling, especially if you at the same time rule out any news sources, and make sure to block anyone on the Internet that potentially could say something that isn’t just the same as you always hear.

I cannot change that attitude to life. And I don’t think that I want to, either. Some people really need that abstraction from real life more than they need to know what is going on. And here, of course, the Matrix cliché fits in: some people really don’t want to know what the world really looks like, so they take that pill (I have forgotten which color) that keeps them in the illusion, rather than the one that will take them out of it.

But…

If there are any people out there, and it is possible, somehow, to get in touch with them, with whom I can talk about human rights, the environment, and some of the other topics I care about – some people who are ready to engage in at least gaining an understanding of some of the big questions of today – then I would like that. And I wouldn’t know, if I kept my articles at home without publishing them.

Hence, my new stacks.

After a few days of downtime, thinking about life and the meaning of it all, including writing, Substack, and the millions of consumers of the writing, I ended up trying out something I had been considering.

It has now resulted in a few new Substacks, each focused on a topic.

So, you can pick the topics you are interested in and subscribe to them individually – isn’t that just as flexible as it gets? ;)

Some of you will know from my writing so far, that I tend to mix two opposite trends in my writing:

1. Being brave and bold and talking about what I think matters

2. Hiding some of the deeper meaning between the lines

This is me, sorry. I think and write this way.

Telling all the details straight out often scares away people who don’t agree, no matter what it is about. The wish to learn new things is not strong with most people – they like the known space more than the new and untested territory.

But convoluting everything in clichés and politeness isn’t very satisfactory for the one who feels that he has something to tell. Because, telling requires that someone is listening, and preferably also understanding, otherwise telling makes no sense.

The new Substacks help a bit on this, in that I will be more straight in my message, which will always be about the one topic of that Substack, but also more experimenting by adding some thinking that is not fully developed yet, essentially asking you for your help to bring it into a state where it is good and useful.

I ask for active listening. This is not TV. I am not making movies. I am talking to people, hoping for them to respond.

Of course, I know that I’m just a chicken, believing he can fly, and that may look pathetic at times. “Who does he think he is? Why not just stick to the proven topics, those that do not cause a conflict. And then putting pictures of flowers on the articles. I like flowers!”

Well, there are millions of such articles. For whatever reason, people never read the older ones, only what has been published just now, but they could, just as well, read the old ones if they want all the old stuff served over and over again.

On the other hand, even when trying to write about new thoughts, I am perfectly aware that millions of people before me have thought about the same things. It is really hard to be unique, but it is also unnecessary. The point is that the sweet spot lies in between the cliché articles and the new thoughts, taking in something unknown and trying to treat it by thoughts and words to become a new part of the known, sitting there at the edge of the known land, but becoming more familiar over time.

That others have found that bit of land before me doesn’t change anything, it is still new for me, needing a bit of time, thought, and love, to become a true element of the universe as I know it.

That’s the reason for writing about it.

Writing gives me a chance to turn the things around in the head, sometimes several times, and it provides a possibility to bring in other people’s thoughts as well.

I have learned a lesson from the past year, in that I know that I can’t expect anyone to read anything, and that the Notes feature is completely worthless for me, almost never bringing any kind of connection with people, or even just more readers. So, I just post in the new substacks when I want, about what I want, and I understand that 99.999999% of Internet readers don’t care the least about it – most of these being on Notes.

I also understand that nobody ever reads the old articles. As mentioned, I don’t understand why, as they are just as good as the new ones, but that’s just how it is. So everything I write until subscribers start appearing will never be read by anyone.

Nobody ever looks at the front page of the Substack. This time around, I’ll therefore not spend time trying to design it nicely. That would be a complete waste of time.

What a weird place it is, this internet!

The new Substacks are mentioned hereafter, and you are welcome to subscribe to those you are interested in. There are some articles already to start with. Happy reading!

Oh, and the old substacks might get an article now and then as well, if I write something that would fit better there.

Environmentality

About the nature and everything in the part of the universe that affects our lives or provides a frame for us to exist. It is mostly about trees and animals, but also about pollution, energy, and other aspects by which we humans are in touch with the environment, for better or for worse.

I focus on the way we think about it all, hence the title and its hint to mentality. You will probably not see many scientific reports from me here, but rather such articles that emphasize an emotional treatment of this topic, that logically resides in our reptile brain, being totally essential to our survival.

Environmentality

There is much too little focus on the environment, and we need to develop a new mentality that puts it much higher on the agenda

By Jorgen Winther

Free World Dream

As it is written on the tin, it is about freedom, all aspects of it, from all over the world, and I am fully aware that freedom often is a dream, only. I want people to convert that dream to a goal, and then to reality. And I believe that we can do that together. Because, as I like to say, freedom must be given, it cannot be taken. If nobody treats us as if we are free, then we aren’t. We must give this to each other.

Free World Dream

It's about the dream of a world where we are all free. Free to speak, study, get a job, stay where we are, without being pushed or bombed away by anyone, and to dream, think, evolve and develop all that is needed for all of us to thrive.

By Jorgen Winther

Factoids

I got tired at one time of the school teacher’ish articles all over the Internet that tried to tell people why it couldn’t be true that the Earth was flat, even though some people claimed that it was, and no, Clint Eastwood isn’t a robot, he is a real human, and here is the evidence…

To me, knowing the world is not about true or false. It is not about debunking myths or revealing lies. It is about using every opportunity to think, and from that, to learn something. And your thoughts are the important ones here, not the school teacher’s.

So, I decided to deal with a bunch of these factoids, truisms, or unscientific thoughts, whatever you prefer to call them, through some short articles that introduce various thoughts about them. You can then, as the reader, continue the thinking and decide what you want to about the factoid itself. Hopefully, your thinking will bring you off track and let you consider something completely different as well.

Factoids

It's not about right or wrong, it's about thinking – capturing typical thoughts and turning them around, inside out, to see what they're made of

By Jorgen Winther

The Complete World of Music

Some of you have noticed that I am very fond of music. I understand that not everybody is, and having a separate Substack for articles about that topic will therefore be a bliss for those who can then avoid it, and perhaps a pleasure for those who would like to follow it.

I am treating this Substack differently from all others – and in fact, differently from any blog or website I have ever administered before, in that it has a manuscript! All articles will fit into one, big story, covering everything about music, hence the title.

These different articles will not be published in the same order as you would find them in my manuscript, though. I work with many sub-topics in parallel, and I generally publish an article when it is ready, no matter where in the bigger story it fits.

Some day into the future, the date is not set, I hope that all of this together will become a good basis for that book about music, I find missing in the market, and then I will put that book together and publish it.

The Complete World of Music

All aspects related to music and how it affects us all, how it’s made, who makes it, listens to it, creates the instruments, and a lot more

By Jorgen Winther

I have always been good at giving advice. Many people have lifted themselves up by the help of what I could tell them about life and what matters, what doesn’t.

And now, to the cliché, you are waiting for: I am miserable at advising myself.

Of course, this is what people always say. Maybe I should have advised myself to not say it, but this is, genuinely, what I feel right now.

If you have read any of my posts about social media, then you should know that I am not overly excited about that concept, as it has unfolded over the years. Substack falls into that category, so why am I here?

I have no good answer to that question, but I can see that one of the good, old pieces of advice I have always given to others now applies to myself too: that they should ensure to balance things so that they do as much that gives them energy as what takes energy – at the end of the day, they should end up being enriched by the things they did that day, all-in-all.

The sum of plusses and minuses should end up in a plus.

Currently, Substack, along with all other media – not just social media – drains me for energy.

I attempt in several ways to talk to people about important things, and even though there are some who respond now and then, I feel the burden of the many who don’t.

Too many minuses.

As my life isn’t offering me many (or any) plusses currently, despite my serious hunt for those, I am now out of energy and initiative and have to take my own advice and stop some of the drains, including Substack.

While I can live with disagreement, I can’t live with getting no response at all from the world on things that matter to me.

Maybe it would have been better, if there had been another source of thought-exchange that I could bid into, like friends I could meet now and then and with whom I could talk about the world. Or, at least some kind of balanced treatment of the big questions of today in the existing media.

Or, as a last resort, just the knowledge of there being at least some people in the world who still behave rationally and are able to balance all that happens into sound considerations and actions.

But there isn’t any of all that, and looking for it but not finding it takes all my energy.

I see only a big minus at the end of each day.

So, it is not about writing, it is about trying to get into a dialog with the world about the writing. And that simply doesn’t happen to a large extent.

My solution, for now, is to pull the plug – and keep writing, but for myself.

As I hate seeing each day how nobody read anything I published, and as I’m not successful with just not checking, I will close down my activities on Substack, like this:

1. Each site will, for a start, be made private. This means that new subscribers can ask, I’ll get an email, and then I can decide if they can subscribe. Existing subscribers will not be affected.

2. Chats will be closed

3. I’ll stop both writing to and reading from Notes

4. I’ll not publish anything to any of the sites

5. I’ll after a while stop checking for comments, and ultimately stop answering them – and then switch off comments altogether

6. I may, after some considerations, remove all the stuff from here. Then, perhaps I can publish some of it somewhere else, if I can start believing that people will read it there instead.

As I have paid for the domain names, I don’t want to close the sites completely, in case I should later want them back, therefore they’ll stay, but without activity.

I have made no decision for the future further ahead – maybe I’ll come back, maybe with a new name and a new style, being a fake person, such as it is liked by most. I may even start teaching you how to grow your substack! But just now I haven’t decided on anything.

Since there are literally millions of other sites and just as many other publishers here on Substack, there shouldn’t be any reason for anyone feeling that they are losing anything. And I’ll have peace of mind when writing just for myself, not needing to even think about who might want to read it or not.

So, starting with this site, circling around to the others over a few days.

So long, and thanks for all the great talks we’ve had – and thanks for reading.

And, just for the record, I do know that a few people here actually did support me, perhaps reading more of my stuff than they wanted to, just to make me happy, and I am forever thankful for that.

A recent study showed how 50% of people in the USA get their news from TV, with a smaller percentage from social media and other news media, respectively. In other countries, the share was different, with the Scandinavian countries significantly different: about 15% from TV and 50% from social media.

As some will know, I feel that Substack Notes works badly, as it allows for some people and posts to thrive, while others are ignored completely. There are, occasionally, some of the non-thriving people who complain, and at even rarer occasions their complaints are being heard and answered by others with a “just keep on, sooner or later your posts will be read by some” – which then comes true for some of them, but not for all.

When Substack was first established, only people from the USA were invited to take part in it. Later, when the Americans had established a functioning culture on the platform, with their idols and paid VIP participants who could lead the way forward, while the other participants were watching, other parts of the world were accepted in waves. Some would have their own language implemented on the platform, allowing for them to build up a parallel culture, completely out of sync with the English-language one, while others had to subscribe to the English version, which, as mentioned, was already established.

Entering into an established culture isn’t easy. You may have noticed how many companies, when hiring, are requiring the new hires to be “a good fit” for the existing company culture. It is never expected that the culture will take in what the new people can bring, adjusting to give room to all of it – no, the new ones just have to fit in from the start. It is even a specific discipline in the Human Resource sphere (now often called something like Humans and Culture, but still being the same thing) – methods and mechanisms, and tests, that can determine if you fit in. Most don’t, so it is a brutal sorting mechanism. The older the company, the worse.

Entering into an established social media culture is similar, and I will, a bit harsh, claim that most newcomers do not fit in. The existing people there will not want to take in what the newcomers can bring, they will instead feel that if the new ones behave exactly like the existing, then they may be allowed to be there – but they will not be allowed to shake the bag or rock the boat in any way; just to silently slip into the mass of anonymous watchers, who can admire the established idols and paid VIPs.

For Americans, this is natural. They are, apparently, used to just watching the TV, not participating actively, and they do not understand at all why people from other countries might want to be heard – why can’t they just read the posts from the VIPs, like everybody else?

Americans find it annoying when anybody speaks up to suggest a more open and inclusive way of using the social medium, and with the new mechanisms for blocking people at hand, it is easy to get back to status quo after such an interruption of the peaceful and uneventful existence on the platform – just block the noise, just rule out the attempts to create room for the newcomers.

This is then enforced by the different topics, the newcomers want to talk about. In the cultural sphere, there are very many things that are, by large, unknown to Americans – if it isn’t promoted by American companies, it doesn’t exist. The fact that the world is 20 times bigger than the USA doesn’t seem to have much influence on an American’s curiosity. Actually, they prefer to block everything that isn’t American.

Foreign languages? Block. Unknown musicians? Block. History? Block. Science and rational thinking? Block.

The American unparticipating TV culture leads to non-participation in other aspects of life as well, and to building a wall around the Americans that keeps anything else out.

Substack is dominated by Americans. They were here first, they own the place, they decide what fits in, and they don’t want their boat rocked.

But all of this may be a bit strange to read for the one who knows how engaged Americans can be: I mean, TV shows like Oprah Winfield and Dr. Phil displays how enthusiastically participating the audience is. People are not just watching, they are shouting, standing up at times, having a fight in between each other, and much more of that. It may be theater, of course, but if it would be completely unrecognizable for the TV audience, they probably wouldn’t accept it as real.

On the other hand, the USA is also the land of show wrestling. A parody of a sport, where nothing is real or genuine. Which counts for boxing as well, mostly fixed games there, I could probably include politics as well, American brands which are in reality from China, and many other aspects of the American society. All fake.

Americans don’t want real. They don’t want genuine. They want to watch. And what they watch should express the emotions and the level of action they don’t have themselves. It reminds them about how great everything is, even if it is only on TV. They also don’t want anyone to question if this is good. Of course it is! It is the national standard culture, the one we watch every day, have watched all our lives, and hope to grow old watching, they think.

So, they want everybody on their platform, Substack, to obey to that simple principle of not introducing anything real, not to interfere when the VIPs are talking, not to expect anything, not to question anything, and not to introduce anything new.

Stability!

So, we from Scandinavia, who get 15% of our news from the TV, and I guess an even smaller percentage of our lives in general, we do not fit in. We will not be let in, because our expectations are different, and hence, we are not wanted. We can still watch, the most generous Americans think, but we shouldn’t disturb them in enjoying their culture.

Why is this behavior self-destructive?

Because it stops development, making it impossible to adapt to changed conditions, and therefore allows for events and external developments to overrun these people, take them by storm. There will be no resistance, as it is more interesting for the Americans to just watch it all on TV, without taking part in it.

Their potential wish for action will be saturated by watching those, fake, actions being taken by others, on that same TV. It’s all one big Oprah Winfield show for them, which they enjoy while the world is on fire.

Enclosing themselves around a stable definition of what their culture is, will allow for the sand to gradually float in and stop the traffic to the harbor, eventually ending all inflow of any new inspiration.

Social media is not a new invention for the Americans: it is a continuation, on a new platform, of an old paradigm, the passive watcher of news and other entertainment.

They will not be able to separate true from false, and indeed, they will not even care, because it is more important for them to be part of the official truth, even if it is fake. They live in a lie, thereby becoming unable to react correctly, even if they should one day decide to actually do something, because they have no idea what the real world looks like.

They will be fighting windmills, at best.

Do you agree?

Some make it big! On Notes, you’ll often find posts from people who began writing, for the first time ever, 20 minutes ago, and now they have 20,000 subscribers and are number 1 or 2 in all categories.

It is hard to decode what makes them that big, as they are mostly writing about all and nothing, in one mix, but they all claim that consistency is what matters. And they all want to tell you how to do like them (only for paid subscribers, of course).

Well, there are also the real successes, and there are many of them. They keep collecting more subscribers, and they get many reactions on anything they publish, be it articles or notes.

But we who live on the other side, the modest ones, are not really taking off.

We get a new subscriber now and then, but others leave, so the total is a very slow progression in that number. As for the articles, it can look even worse, as most of these will have 3 likes and one comment, if they are doing well. Some will have more, but the occasional one will have less.

Notes is a complete disaster for most of us modest ones: many posts there will get no reactions at all, and the occasional one will have 5 as a high number of likes, but questions asked are not answered, requests to share links neither, so it doesn’t feel like anybody really want us there.

We do get a response in many cases when commenting on the popular guys’ and girls’ posts, but just the one response from the posters themselves, not from anyone else.

We are the almost invisible and completely unneeded people there.

While being happy for the connection to a few great people who often or perhaps just now and then take a look at something I wrote in an article, I also feel a lot of the time that I wouldn’t be missed by many if I would stop writing here.

This place certainly doesn’t have an echo at the size of the Internet, where millions of servers all the time take in likes and comments from eager participants in the many discussions initiated by the many popular people.

This whole thing reminds me of several other situations in life where I feel the same, such as in my current job search – even though the companies aren’t inviting me for interviews, I can almost feel they dismay at the distance, when they see my application and quickly conclude that they really don’t care what I can do or which experience I have: I’m not 25, newly graduated and good-looking, so they don’t want me there.

The job market speaks about equal opportunities and how much they want applications from all kinds of people, to reflect the surrounding society. But it is all crap, because they never hire any of these “diverse” people, except for a single one now and then, so that they can show a smiling, diverse face in their annual report, to tell the story about how much they do for the local society.

And the Internet is similar. There should be room for all of us, and the main driver in this should be a wish and some skills to write and to keep entertaining others with the writing. And having done that for the majority of the life of the Internet (for 30 years or so), I can now tell that it is also crap. Here, on the Internet, all the same sorting mechanisms are in place as in the job market.

I keep thinking about Liza from The Simpsons, who in one episode studied why some people always became the victims of bullies, and her conclusion, that nobody wanted to hear, was that “It’s their scent! - The victims smell in a special way that the bullies can’t resist, so the latter just have to bully them!”

I believe that this scent is in my emails with job applications, and it travels with the articles and posts I write and publish on Substack as well.

For the same reason, what I actually had in mind with this article, to provide a questionnaire for you all to get a chance to tell what kinds of contents you would like to see and something about the frequency, the size, and the decorations (own photos vs. stock photos, for instance – or would you like to see my home-knitted socks?) – will not happen. My scent would ensure that the replies would be biased, and I want to avoid that.

Instead, I would ask anyone who has the wish to help me get to the bottom of the problem, to tell a few words in the comments about what they enjoy reading, and what they don’t. If you can add links to other articles that are particularly good or bad – those written by others, in particular, to get inspired from – it will be extra great.

With this, I will see how I may be able to improve things. I would probably need to carry a fully covering protection suit, like they use in laboratories, when writing, going forward. Not to protect me, but to protect the articles from being infected with my scent that makes them unsuccessful. To protect the articles from me.

Looking forward to hearing from you – and growing this place into the teddy bear that all the children would like to have, and which would no longer be in the hands of the most modest success on the Internet. A scent-less joy of reading, full of not me.

My colleague from long ago had a son, a young adult, who was convinced that he was about to die.

Apparently, he didn’t have any illnesses or other physical problems that should lead to death anytime soon, and he wasn’t exposed to outer conditions that would make his steps through life more dangerous than they are for all of us. But he just felt that he should die, that it was coming to him soon.

How do we deal with such a situation?

Well, I think there was a psychologist involved, but I wasn’t close to any of them, so I don’t know any details. The guy did get some treatment, at least, that’s what I know. He also got a lot of worries by his surroundings – his mother was very sad about it but tried to talk about it as something normal, something that just exists in life. She wasn’t asking for pity or help, she just occasionally mentioned something as a response to other talks, such as why she would need a day off or similar.

That’s how we deal with something abnormal: we try to make it normal.

Obviously, the son was suffering and didn’t have much quality in life. How much will you start doing and planning if you expect to die soon?

And for a young man, there’s a lot to plan. A full life ahead, many paths to explore, many things to try, people to get to know. There are also a bunch of expectations from the family, school, the society by large, that may be overwhelming for someone who wants to take it all seriously but doesn’t know how to do all that is expected from it, doesn’t know if he can do it all – or any of it.

Suicidal tendencies are higher for teenagers than for many other groups, at least so it is spoken about by tradition. I haven’t seen any recent statistics, but I can imagine that there are different groups of people who could have such tendencies, and the way statistics is being arranged will then reveal it or not. For instance, there could be a difference between people who are alone and people who are in a relationship, which nobody will know if that detail isn’t part of the statistical material or analysis.

I don’t know if that young guy was suicidal or merely anxious, which I suppose doesn’t need to go together. But I do know from myself and many other people I have met as teenagers or later in life where they were talking about that time and age, that life can seem very difficult, and it can lead to thoughts about ending it.

A large part of this is due to changing from looking at developing one self, often without even thinking about the matter, not understanding that this is what happens when a child is playing or a teenager is diving into their computer game or hanging out with their friends on the corner. Changing into a different life where other people want to decide a direction for them, or maybe not, which is just as bad: being uncertain about what life will bring can actually go hand in hand with a need for honest and helpful advice.

That part shouldn’t be surprising, should it?

Nevertheless, most advice the young ones get is based on a misled conception of what is important in life, something the young one can easily see through. It doesn’t take a mastermind to understand that the ideas of getting a “respectable” job, whatever that is in this social subclass, getting married, and living a “decent” life is all everything else than great.

It doesn’t take much thinking either to understand that some of the problems in society are directly connected with this way of thinking, the discrepancy between the perceived path to a good life and the actual effect of following that path.

For a young person who sees this but cannot get any reasonable and honest advice about what to do then, and who experiences that they are expected to give up everything in life they enjoy, only to get a bunch of things they don’t, perspectives can look quite dark.

And if they don’t feel skilled for this kind of life either, there may not be a visible other path anywhere in their horizon – no attractive goal of staying alive.

This all in a micro-societal perspective. The individual against the society that doesn’t respect the needs of the individual.

When we then add a macro-societal perspective of dark outlooks, I guess that any of us can sink down into thoughts about how this is going to end – and when.

Daily news about wars, hacker attacks, murders, explosions, shootings, crime of all sorts, and an outright insane behavior of the politicians that were supposed to lead our countries forward, make the world better, and provide a way for us to live our lives with a perspective of a better future, with options to pursue, things to enjoy – all that steps on whatever optimism each of us might have left. All of it reminds of that we are going to die.

With all that, surviving and thriving are not a matter of personal strength and skills, not a matter of what each of us want to do or at least, can dream of doing. Because all of that misery we hear about, all the time, makes it look like we are, indeed, destined to die soon.

I wonder why we build up our societies and interactions in such a way that they, by large, kill dreams and passify us, making most of us stop looking ahead and only try to survive in the now.

Of course, if we have given up all hope for the future, we may be easier to convince buying all sorts of things instead of saving our money, because what good will the money do for us when we are dead?

Passive people may also be easier to push around, as the revolutions that arise from a dream of a better future will be less likely.

My colleague’s son was ill, true, but I think that the society makes many people ill. Some to an extent where it is visible, because these people are more sensitive than the others, but the others too, just not necessarily expressing an expectation to die, but still giving up many hopes they may have had about the future.

We live in a time when ideologies have been on return for a while, so people are unreligious, no longer believing in any particular political direction, and even giving up on the idea of saving the whales, the environment, and the planet.

In such a time, we need a humanist approach more than ever. We really should start treating others better, so that they can start believing in the future by believing in something that will be part of the future.

Because, if nobody believes in the future, there won’t be any. Then we can all, for sure, expect to die, leaving nothing behind, no world for the next ones to enjoy.

As always, I’ll advocate for doing something good for at least one other person, each day of your life, with the attempt to making them a bit more happy about life.

We are all going to die, but we should spend some time living, truly living, with a smile and a sense of purpose and value, before we get to that.

You know that expression about “heating for the birds”, when your heating system is working at maximum capacity but the windows are open, for instance, so that the produced heating quickly disappears out in the open.

On Substack, there are many writers working at maximum capacity – creating wonderful texts that are readable, insightful, and definitely worth a visit – but nobody reads them.

I sometimes wonder how it is possible, because all articles are being announced by emails to the subscribers, also on commercials at the top of Notes, and the writer may even share the article through Notes or on other platforms. On top of that, Google actually does index articles from Substack, so it should be likely, one would say, that they will be found when people do Goggle searches.

But despite all of these openings, the writers often end up with “writing for the birds”.

To help promote some of these unread articles, I have searched and found some that I like, which didn’t have any or many likes when I found them – and which I would be happy to recommend reading.

Please look at them, enjoy them, and give them (and their writers) some love with likes, comments, etc., which is the fuel that keeps this machine going for many writers.

A society out of balance

I will immodestly start with one of my own articles, that has gained no traction at all. It tells about some drive forces behind the election of a fascist as the president of a nation that would otherwise be seen as doing well – because of a lacking balance, a difference between people that has grown too big.

Turning Life by Inidox

MAGA, Neo-Nazism and Friends

With the repeated election of a man with extremist opinions as the president of the USA, most Americans have become aware of one way in which their society has changed…

Read more

2 years ago · Jorgen Winther

Fitting in – norms of the society

it is not easy to fit in, but sometimes there are circumstances that are outside our immediate control but where we feel that we are expected by the surroundings to have that control anyway. It leads to many thoughts and adjustments on our plans and behavior. And a great story!

Stories - A Journey To Self, Peace & Love

Not Lonely, Just Alone

Image: Arranging Summer Blooms, Delphin Enjolras…

Read more

3 years ago · 6 likes · 3 comments · Stephanie Clemons

The unique beauty of aging

“New and sterile” is a phrase from this article. Somehow, beauty grows out of the lifetime of things (and humans too?), making them become unique and therefore more interesting than the new. This is a photo-story, displaying quite a lot of not only aged beauty but also interesting color contrasts and historical glimpses, hints to the development of the world.

Lens of Perception

Finding Beauty Where Others See Ruins

This article was originally published on Medium, where it gained significant traction and was featured as a member-only story. I'm excited to share it here on Substack and continue the journey of exploring unconventional beauty with you…

Read more

2 years ago · 4 likes · Davor Katusic

The beginning of a dream

People have dreams, and often they keep dreaming for years, or all life, even. Dreams are what makes us keep going when reality looks a bit misty or rough, when we lose confidence or the trust in our ability to develop enough to actually get anywhere. Dreams, however, start somewhere, and we often forget how that happened. Here is how!

Serial Writer

My first post

Well, here I am…

Read more

a year ago · 4 likes · 1 comment · Serial Writer

Archiving is boring? Nah…!

People often think about certain occupations as boring or without contact to real life, mostly as a result of prejudices and lack of knowledge. Archiving could possibly be the top scorer of such unqualified verdicts, but there are people out there with a story that tells otherwise. And with humor. At least one person, who wrote this article.

I should bring an advertisement/warning for some sexually related words in the article, plus some nerdy words as well.

Visual Liquid Mega Zine

Essay: That Time I Processed Archive Collections at a Republican Think Tank.

In light of my last essay…

Read more

a year ago · 2 likes · Tess McCarthy

That old car cannot continue to carry more weight.

The Internet was a great idea with room for expansion built-in — but social media wasn’t, not when all the developments it has seen since its invention are considered.

Maybe you have, like me, felt how the news aren’t reliable? And I don’t mean whether you can trust what they say, because that’s already a big topic (with a serious tendency to news being untrustworthy in the way they describe things) – no, I’m talking about news being there or not, when you would have expected them. If they “show up” as promised.

The last few days, there has been a remarkable lack of news about some of the big things going on in the world. There were just small notes about the situation in Ukraine, a very limited coverage of the new war between Israel and Iran, and a very sparse coverage of the mass-protests in the USA (“No Kings”), and even, surprisingly, no live coverage and hardly even a mention in various news media of the self-pronounced king’s military parade in the USA.

It is hard to tell what has happened. Recently, some news websites have been hacked and blocked by internet attacks, and perhaps also the news distribution nets behind them have been exposed to such things? If no news is coming in, no news is being told. Of course, the journalists know that things are happening, but they cannot tell about them if they have no pictures and no interviews with key people.

Also, it could be that some of the news by dictate from government institutions of various kinds have been muted.

Whatever the reason, news was absent or bleak.

In such a situation, you would want to rely on your direct network, getting information from people you know around the world and to whom you are connected – through social media. But here’s the thing: social media was just as silent as the news media.

Posts were posted, comments were made, and advertising was poured out all over the social media, as usual, but there was no mention of the events of the world.

Again, this could be a matter of various organizations intervening, or the platforms themselves censoring the posts, which does happen normally and for some reason could have been intensified these days. Or it could be a matter of social media simply having died, quietly, being strangled by the increasingly heavy commercialization and control of the contents by the owners of the platforms.

This meant, as a strange thing, that I could look for information about the lacking news on, for instance, Substack Notes, and find nothing. Only some generic posts about the difference between good people and bad people in the USA, as always, and an increased amount of empty feel-good stuff, that didn’t tell about anything in particular and were of a “timeless” nature where you couldn’t determine when it was written or posted, if it wasn’t for its date-stamp.

Social media has run for too long now to be offering anything useful, as it has been grabbed by commercialism and self-promotion and has stopped being an exchange of thoughts between real, feeling and thinking, people.

So, is this the end?

Yes, in one way. There is nothing to come for if you are seeking genuine connections and free speech, because such things are close to extinct by now on most platforms, only popping up as a rare post that is then even being largely ignored.

And no, in the sense that this non-informative environment of exchanging platitudes and fabricated thoughts and influencing comments will live long, since there is nothing else to take over, so it can be allowed to just slowly fade out.

I have mentioned before how we often don’t have a real alternative when seeking social connection, as the old forms have largely died out:

• You don’t, in many parts of the world, go for a walk in the city and find some of your friends sitting with a cup of coffee at the corner café nearby, to sit down with and enjoy a chat, before you move on and find some more friends and acquaintances to exchange a few words and smiles with.

• You don’t decide to write a letter to the people you know, who are further away and can’t be stumbled upon at the café, but who you want to stay connected with anyway.

• And you don’t get a call now and then from old friends who heard some news from your area and wanted to check if you were okay and if it affected you.

What you have left, as the first, last, and only way of staying in touch, is often the social media. And even if these are defunct, you will keep trying to get something useful out of them. You will read (doomscroll) through all the crap in the hope of finding something that can enlighten you or cheer you up, perhaps even make you feel that you are part of something, not just a leftover from the lost Internet revolution, the attempt to make the electronic world become alive and full of real, open talk.

It is there, but it isn’t social media. It is media, that’s true, but it isn’t social.

Social would imply a feeling of being a human amongst other humans when using it, and that feeling is hard to find now.

Today, on Notes, I saw one genuine little post by someone who felt some actual human feelings and also felt that she had to almost excuse the mentioning of them. Better than a censored ad, that’s for sure, but why is it necessary to excuse being human?

And that is where I feel that the social media concept has finally died, reached its end-of-life, probably to be schematically supported during a period after this, but heading towards its final day, when it will be switched off and forgotten.

Many of the great composers of classical music were living from writing notes. They might have been music teachers as well, or even performing as conductors or musicians, but they were hoping to get their notes published, much like today’s musicians are hoping for a record contract.

Notes were the way for people to get to know music that had been written by others, sometimes far away. If a composer was lucky, an orchestra would decide to perform the music, which would often add a considerable extra income to the patchwork of income streams. A performance would also make the music better known, which would inspire more individuals to buy the notes.

And notes were mostly bought by individuals. Not to the same extent as people today buy records (CDs or whatever format), but there was a group of people who were sufficiently wealthy to be able to have instruments and lucky enough to have time to play them, and these people bought the notes.

Even though you can still buy notes, and this indeed is happening a lot, as there are, today, many more musicians, and most of them are able to buy notes when they want, the bulk of the music industry earnings has moved to the sales of ready music – recordings.

A development that we have seen in more recent times, is the books about how to play. It may not be a new invention, but the market is flooded with such books now, and you can find a very large selection of them for the most popular instruments, and even some books dedicated to more rare instruments. The wave of self-publishing and print-on-demand has added to this, and probably many of these books do not sell many copies. A few, though, become mega-hits and sell hundreds of thousands of copies.

One such mega-hit, at least by title and concept of the series, is the “for Dummies” series. These books have been around for a long while and cover many topics, not just music, and they have something in common that most other books on the market, especially for teaching practical things, are lacking: they are readable! By this, I mean that you can use them as bed reading or bring them with you in the bus or train, as you don’t need to have the musical instrument by you when reading them. There will be at least some sections that are pure text, to be read and learned from.

The idea of being “for dummies” may not appeal to everybody – who wants to be called a dummy? But it promises that everyone can start here, which is not that stupid. Most musicians are beginners. We buy an instrument because now we want to learn how to play it, and then what? How should we proceed?

The “for Dummies” books give all kinds of information, both the silly, simple type that some more professional readers would consider too basic, and some more advanced stuff. The main idea of them seems to be to give you a lot of different aspects, at several levels, for you to get moving in your new music journey.

Not everything in such a book is necessarily complete, or even correct, and they often tend to be written by people who are known in the area the book is about, such as “guitar” or “music theory”, but these people are not automatically great writers, and they do not necessarily know everything – or they may believe that they know something which is then wrong.

They also tend to be very American. Even though not all of them have been written by Americans, many of them have, and they are not even trying to look out from that country into the rest of the world, to adapt what they are telling so that it fits the situation people there would find themselves in. There is, in other words, a lot of Americanisms and local lingo, and they often refer to places, people, products, and brands that are largely unknown outside the USA.

But for a start, or for supplement, to bring in some more aspects in your learning process, they are useful. I have several of them myself, and I generally enjoy them. I just don’t trust that what is written in them is complete and correct, so they must be combined with other reading.

The “for Dummies” books mostly have a teaching element in them, so you can learn something about how to play the guitar, for instance, from the “Guitar for Dummies” book, written by Mark Philips. It is a solid book with hundreds of pages, and if you buy the “All-in-One” edition, it covers enough stuff for you to be occupied for weeks or months with learning. And there are actually several other books in the series about the guitar or various aspects of guitar playing, so you can get them all and learn a lot, if you want.

But the structure and the way these books are written, makes them less efficient for targeted learning, where you specifically want to get up to speed on a narrow topic.

For this, there are other books. I can suggest looking at the large selection of books by Troy Nelson Music, which have various shapes and concepts, but one of the series is “Learn How To Play xx In 14 Days!” - which exist for several different instruments, and also for more specific topics for each instrument.

I have seen many comments on the internet when these books have been mentioned, and they often go like “You can’t learn how to play xx in 14 days!” – but that’s not the point of these books. They are meant to get you started. And you can get started with anything in 14 days, if you want.

The basic concept is that you’ll have 6 exercises per day, 6 days of the week, and on the 7th day, you’ll learn how to play a tune instead – making use of the things you practiced during the week. Two weeks of this, and you’re done. And you do know how to play the instrument after that, especially those two tunes, which you know and can play both through the melody voice and the accompaniment.

You also know 72 topics, that you have rehearsed during 10–15 minutes each, which is long enough to reprogram your brain from “I can’t do that” into “it’s a natural, I don’t even need to think about it”.

And, of course, if you cannot find the time (1-1.5 hours) that each day’s lessons are scheduled to take, you can spread your study thinner, doing, for instance, half of it each day – and then it will take longer.

Having such short, focused, bursts of study, is a good technique to get you started. Then you can move on with more complex and time-consuming topics after that, or you can continue in the same way, arranging your study time in a similar manner – in burst mode.

Other books are more traditional, with one book covering a sequence of different topics, such that the book in total brings you from beginner’s to intermediate level, or similar.

These are not typical, however, and the kind of book that was common some 30–40 years ago, hardly exists anymore: in big format, bound, with many pages of carefully edited and graphically designed pages – real coffee-table books, actually, but meant for speaking to the musician, making them keep up the interest while having a good experience of reading the book.

It is obvious why it has gone that way: The current books a cheaper to arrange, all the way from writing over printing and selling to delivery, and if you can sell 10 thin books about narrow topics, that will probably earn you more money than if you try to squeeze everything into one, big book.

But there are many books that are somewhere in between: slightly more pages than the narrow ones, and covering more than one topic. The publisher Hal Leonard has very many of such books, plus some of the narrow ones, while others, such as the popular publisher, Fundamental Changes, excel in the narrow ones.

The changes in the publishing industry caused by the internet include a new possibility for self-publishing all-over the globe, with included print-on-demand possibilities. While several companies have attempted to get a foothold in this new kind of publishing, it is fair to say that Amazon has run with almost all of the market.

Publishers in this sphere can be small or big, and I have actually seen some of the traditional publishers also go that way, selling some of their books through Amazon’s sales, printing, and distribution systems.

But it has additionally opened a door for individuals with a drive to begin publishing their works on their own – not having to rely on a big publisher wanting to collaborate on it.

One such publisher is Dave Brown who through his FlamencoUkulele.com site gives further information about his books, and they are all sold through Amazon. Dave Brown tells the story of him once playing the guitar, but after an accident, he couldn’t play it anymore but was able to find joy in the ukulele, and now he creates books about how to play that instrument.

Another very remarkable contributor to this scene is Ondrej Sarek, who arranges all kinds of music for a large number of different instruments, including local ones, some of which are not exactly the most typical across the world, and publishes these as books through Amazon, while showing examples from the books on YouTube. I am not sure how many books he has published so far, but it must be hundreds, and the number of videos on YouTube surpasses 1,900!

In fact, Troy Nelson, mentioned above, is also in that category, letting Amazon print and deliver all his books.

The development in the publishing industry has created some mixed publications of recorded music and books. While the era of including a CD with just about any book seems to have faded out in general, there is, luckily, still room for such projects when it makes sense.

SevenMuses MusicBooks has made an absolute gem of a little book about the Portuguese guitar, which comes with a couple of CDs containing music played with this instrument, and Fado music in general. The book is dual-language, Portuguese and English, and perhaps the translation quality lacks a bit behind now and then, but the English is fully understandable and the book is very enjoyable. The writer, Samuel Lopes, has managed to collect very many details and interesting stories that you can’t find anywhere else. This instrument and its development and use has been described in many places of the internet, but often with wrong details or a complete lack of such, so this one book is, in my opinion, the most comprehensive and detailed account there is, anywhere, about this instrument, its history, who builds it, plays it, etc.

They have other books as well, all with music included, and I will definitely check out some more of them. This concept seems to have been made possible by the convergence of music recording, book publishing, and the Internet/webshops for the marketing, as it would otherwise have been a difficult thing to create and sell.

Another exciting book concept is “Fado” from earBooks, an imprint of Edel Books. It doesn’t appear on their website, so here are a couple of links to the big version and the small version (with wrong title), both through Amazon (but you can find other resellers as well). This concept is a photobook with music. You can study the history of Fado through photos from the past, carefully arranged to convey the ambience of Portugal, Lissabon, at the time, and what Fado as a music style was to fit into. The large version of the book is full of photos and has four CDs, while the smaller version has fewer photos and just one CD.

Music can be treated in books in many ways, not just as notes, as it was the case many years ago, but now also as instructions on how to play, details on how to use and care for the instrument, and many other practical things – and then additionally this kind of beauty in words and pictures.

Notes can still be bought, though, as I mentioned earlier, and this kind of publishing has diversified – you can still buy books with notes, or even individual sheets, and a large shop with such books (plus other music related items) is Musicroom, but others, like Sheet Music Direct (part of Hal Leonard) sell access to notes on a subscription basis – pay monthly, and you’ll get access to a large number of notes. There are online shops for individual sets of notes as well, typically promising something for free when you find them in a Google search, after which they quickly tell you to pay 5 dollars or similar to actually get the notes.

Publishing is not only books anymore. Publishing about music can include the music as recordings, can be the music as notes, and it can teach you how to play the music. It can take place electronically, on paper, as individual purchases or as a subscription.

If you like books and also music, you have today very good opportunities to find great books to dive into.