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.

I know it’s a cliché, but “if you can dream it, you can do it” – I believe in that!

You need to know the details, though, as it isn’t as you might think from the words alone. You see, clichés are based on life. All of it, condensed into very few words to say something about something, that will make you think a bit.

A cliché isn’t meant to tell it all. So if you find that it is superficial, it’s because you’ve forgotten to fill in the blanks.

Blanks.

That’s life.

Like one of those tests where some words are missing in a text, and you should try to find some that’ll fit. That’s life. Finding the words that fit. The test itself is a cliché, and you fill it in, thereby discovering the full meaning of it all.

Not that life necessarily has a meaning, but you can give it one, if you want. Most people seem to want that. Others are truly mindful and can manage to just take every second as it appears, enjoying the wonders that minutes can bring, making a rich day out of the lot.

But most of us have dreams, plans, and wishes. And they stay that way until we do something, as dreams do not come true just by themselves. You’ll have to dare, invest, give something, in order to get a chance to get back what you want. You’ll have to buy a lottery ticked to get the chance to win the lottery.

Or you can choose to consider everything that appears as a win in the lottery that you yourself is the ticket to. The lottery of you, the one that you for sure will always win, but with unknown prices.

The last few days led to some discoveries for me. In a way, as part of my mandolin journey that I have written about in other articles, but also next to that. As you may have discovered, any journey isn’t very interesting in itself, it is merely a matter of keeping an eye and a thought on everything you’ll pass along the way. The flowers in the dike, the trees a bit further away, and the mountains or the ocean behind – whatever is there. And what is happening. Life is not a photo, it’s moving. A butterfly lands carefully on a fragile flower to have a snack, and birds are dancing in the air, having newly found each other and being so happy that they just can’t sit still.

Knowing that there’s a lot more happening than you can see should make you feel some level of respect. Respect for life and all that’s in it. For the way in which it is so big and yet, consists of only small things. The bigness is in your mind only, the connectedness is for you to feel that you understand. For you to have something to label, group, remember.

Some of my discoveries were uplifting, some were sad. Some were both.

An example of the last category was called Lhasa.

Was, because she died young. A girl deciding to become a singer, then doing it, having a completely new take on what singing actually means. A true genius and artist, making some of the most amazing music I’ve ever heard. And for some reason I just never heard of her, until now. Or, that is, I just never knew that I’d heard of her, because diving into her music and collaborations made me understand that I did hear about her, being one of those butterflies along the way, or maybe a bird – or the ocean – which I just didn’t understand until now.

Lhasa died from cancer, 37 years old. That was 15 years ago, and I found out about that just after having found out what magical music she made. Like flying high, then discovering that the wings can’t carry me, and then dropping like a stone.

It’s sad, but it’s also interesting. I have written before about the sometimes depressing nature of many artists, I like, are dying. Of course, we are all going to die, so it shouldn’t feel that special, but it does. And that has made me consider that there may be a natural reason for humans to hunt for youth. We become fans of young musicians or sports people, enjoy the look of “young” in ads. I always thought that it was about nostalgia, the revival of a memory of when we were there ourselves, but I understand now how it may be the opposite: the hope of these idols outliving us. Because we cannot handle well to see how people we care about are dying, and that makes us seek out some young ones with less risk of being ripped away from us before we are ready for it.

Only, in some cases, that trick doesn’t work. It didn’t with Lhasa, who was lost much too early.

Another discovery is Souad Massi, a woman from Algeria, who also became a singer. She was born about the same time as Lhasa, and luckily, we still have her with us. Some of what makes her special, more than everybody in this world is special, is her way of singing in both her native Berber language, in Arabic, and many other languages, of which some are quite complicated to fit to some of the music styles she is singing, but she does it anyway.

She dares. And her life has been a lot about daring, as some people felt it okay to threaten her on her life, basically because she was a woman who wanted to sing. Or something. I don’t always get what makes some people believe that they should be the judges of other people’s lives, deciding what another person wants to do with her life.

Souad Massi dares to sing all those genres that are not fit for her original culture, and she dares to sing in languages that are somewhat awkward at times for the task – and it makes her expression very strong.

She is strong because she dares. People tend to believe that they need to be strong in order to dare to do something, but it works the other way around. The expression of strength appears as a result of what you do. It is not something you bring into the equation, it’s the result of it.

The world takes some turns now and then, and it has led to many bad things happening during history. People have behaved in ways that are beyond imagination, and often worse than anyone ever did before them. Colonies are in that end of the specter, because even though the idea of having a colony isn’t by concept bad, it has had bad consequences for very many people.

Colonies have basically been an expression of capitalism, a matter of finding low-cost ways of producing something. Be it sugar, timber, or spice. As always with capitalism, this could have been done in a good way, to the benefit of everybody involved – a collaboration with all parties as winners. But, also as always, it wasn’t. Colonies always led to slavery and other forms of mistreatment of other people, and it led to some of the parties getting all the benefits, while others got all the trouble and misery.

Algeria was a French colony, and one of the turns, life took on this, was that France could now become a safe haven for Souad Massi, who lives and works from there now, having dared to move to some place else, to escape from a culture that didn’t understand her, didn’t allow her to dream and hope. But she dared to break away, and she could, because the old colony power could serve as an escape route.

My mandolin journey has crossed paths with the destinies of two remarkable women, even though we are in different dimensions. They are now known anchors in my universe, and this way, their dreams and hopes become mine, their dares become my win.

We make the connections. The universe is ours to shape. I have made room for these two stars, now participating in both guiding me across the sea at night, and affecting me by gravity and their curbing of the universe, which I let them do, now seeing how other things are attracted to the areas around these centers of gravity.

Not predictable at all, but it does carry a lot of weight. Two blanks filled in, adding a lot of meaning.

There were a lot of things going on when I was 16–19 years old! I think I have mentioned previously, that I write various things at that time, such as humoristic texts, poems, and songs, and much of it was published, some of the songs performed, either by me or by others.

This article is written because I just fell over a bunch of those old writings, and that made me think a bit. This bunch was about 37 years old.

In those days, I didn’t think too much about writing as anything serious. It just was. Not a career, not a thing to take seriously. “Getting published” wasn’t a goal, not even a dream, like it is for many who write today. I guess that I just looked at life as it unfolded day by day, and took in what it offered, and I wrote because I liked to do it, the same way as today.

There were also problems of various kinds, with economy, girls, study, hangovers, and almost everything else. Then, as now, I was often in a position where I felt that I just needed a bit of room around me, a bit of my own life, such one that I could decide over myself, rather than being pushed around by others. But for a young person, everybody wants to push them around, so there was always that tension between me and the world, where I never felt that I was fully allowed to be me.

I wrote songs and poems about all that, and most of it wasn’t published. It is a bit unclear what may have been read by others, as I have had some strange experiences along the way in life:

Some poems and other writings that I had decided to throw away - and did - started appearing in my mailbox a while after, one after another. Nobody ever told me that they did it, but I had some suspicions. Whatever this was all about, I suppose that they had read these things, even though it is unclear how they found them in the trash.

Years after, I suddenly got a binder with a bunch of additional texts of different kinds - this time from my father, who had found them between some of his old papers and concluded that they had to be mine.

I wonder what else has been spread out in the world and read by people, and what still exists. It is, after all, more than 35 years since it was written.

The world was different then. Not just for me, because I was so young, but for everybody.

I had a computer, a home computer more precisely, which was uncommon then. It was not connected to the Internet, as such a thing didn’t exist yet, and even though I had a printer, it was of such a primitive type that it was unsuitable for most real-world purposes.

So, as a writer, I got myself a typewriter. First a fancy, modern one with a memory and a small display, that allowed me to type a line of text before it was printed on the paper. This way, I could edit the text before it went on paper, and most of what I wrote with that one, therefore, was flawless, more or less.

But it had tiny little ink cartridges that lasted for about 7–8 pages, and they had a price of around 8 dollars each, so it became a very expensive improvement of my life. Also, I couldn’t get used to this strange rhythm of writing one line at a time, then stop and edit, and finally wait for it to print, until I could write the next line.

Luckily, the shop where I’d bought it agreed to take it back when I bought a more traditional electrical typewriter instead.

What I find now, has mostly been written with one of these two machines, and only in rare cases by using the computer.

Some of the songs were love songs, never to be heard or read by the subject of my love. She didn’t know, and circumstances were so that it made no good sense to tell her. But I felt it, and wrote about it.

Now that I think about it, I remember how I also wrote love poems for another guy who couldn’t do it himself but wanted to impress a girl. She was impressed, I think, but she was also a bit puzzled, since that guy wasn’t exactly what you would call a literary type. At some point in time, I managed to tell her that I wrote them, not him, which made her very sad. I still regret that I told it, and in a way, I regret that I wrote them for him. The whole thing had an aura of dishonesty over it. But the poems were good, as I remember it, even though I don’t think I have a copy of them, so I cannot check it out.

People didn’t have computers, I mentioned. Most people didn’t have typewriters either. When they wrote something, it was mostly by hand. As students, we wrote a lot, of course, and it took time for writing a draft, then writing the whole thing again, this time with errors corrected and the nicest possible handwriting style.

I was miserable at that two-step approach. I usually wrote two completely different texts instead: one in the draft, another in the final version. I suppose that is why I later in life, when using a computer became the norm, simply got used to just write what I wanted to say straight out of my mind in one go, like this text. No editing afterward, and no attempt to run through it for editing and improving it, because that just means writing one more story.

Since I was a vegetarian in a place far away from any real city, in the middle of nowhere, it was complicated for me to go shopping for food. They had almost nothing interesting, apart from the sparse selection of vegetables that meat-eaters in the country like to eat. For that reason, cooking became a hobby for me, and I found recipes and prepared them by not only cooking, but also searching all the nearest shops in the towns around where I lived, to actually get some ingredients to cook from.

This cooking hobby led to me having a section in our school magazine for gastronomy. I don’t know what I was thinking, but it was written in a humoristic style, which, I found out, meant that nobody wanted to try cooking any of my recipes, as they simply thought that it was only for fun. They never suspected that the recipes themselves were indeed great, even if wrapped up in humor.

Some of the poetry, actually most of it, was in the other end of the scale. Very serious and deep. Not always depressed, even though it could be, but in poetry I found that I could write in a completely free style about anything that was on my mind, mostly emotional. When looking at the poetry now, I see a young man’s mind, but one that is still part of me. So, I recognize the thoughts and emotions, but I think that even if I could write something similar today, it would more likely be fried on both sides, so to speak, as I now try to expand that immediate emotion that is behind a poem. Not sure that it becomes better from it, though. The young me had some qualities that are now rarely exposed, as life has partly reshaped them, partly covered them with all that garbage we collect through life, of which ambitions, a wish to fit into the society, make a career, etc., creates an almost impenetrable layer of non-value that prevents that young us from being heard.

Maybe someone, some day, will find some of my old me’s thoughts in that garbage, and start feeding them through my mailbox?

Looking back on life doesn’t make me want it to come back. A lot of my life was of a nature that I am happy to have survived, and I don’t think back on it with pleasure.

But bits and pieces were good. Of life, and of me. And that should be welcome back, if it only, this time, can refrain from evolving into something unwanted.

I thought about trying to translate some of the old poems from their original Danish (I wrote some in English as well, but didn’t stumble upon any this time around), but I realized that it was not only difficult, it was impossible, as some of them were very much of a linguistic exercise, using the language into its edges and corners, and there would also be a translation needed of both the writer, the young me from long ago, into a modern person, and the time and its topics and problems, into the modern life.

A lot of the emotions and events of those days would probably be incomprehensible for today’s people. Of course, some people are as old as me and may remember something from back then, but most people are not, or do not remember — or simply didn’t live that life I lived.

So, I’ll let the past be the past, and again, after this little glimpse of nostalgia, turn my eyes and my mind in the other direction, to live now, the next moments, and in the future, with the conditions that exist by then — me being the new me, the world being the new world, and life moving in only one direction.

“Poems, everybody! The lad here reckons himself a poet!”

Maybe you have seen the movie The Wall and remember this situation, where the not so pleasant teacher makes sure to ridicule the poor school boy who was quietly writing something in his copybook during the class. Poems, as it appeared.

The inner world doesn’t meet much respect. Nether in The Wall, nor in the real world. I guess that most people understand poetry as something that exists and must be accepted as part of the world and its history. We know how poetry was a way of writing that appeared very long ago – so long, that the ancient Greek stories, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey, were written as poems.

We know that there has been famous poets along the way through history, and we are in general not ridiculing those. And we consume poetry by large amounts in the shape of songs, part of many people’s everyday life, always on in the earbuds. Words in the thousands, shaped as poetry, accompanied by music.

In some parts of the world, it is even a fun and appreciated tradition to write a dedicated song for a party. Often not great poetry, that’s for sure, but appreciated just the same for the few minutes it takes for the gathered people to extend their good mood by singing it and, not the least, saluting, toasting, cheering, and drinking along the way.

Or how about the limericks or other small, funny verses, or the slightly more intellectual haiku, that some people are happy to share at proper occasions? Yes, we do appreciate poetry, as it is part of tradition in some specific situations in life.

But we do, in general, see poetry as inappropriate in most other situations. Few are the adverts that dare to squeeze in poetry, and when they appear, they mostly make fun of the idea. For instance, a person in the ad trying to write a naive poem for his loved one. And we laugh, due to the inappropriateness, the embarrassing situation he is in.

When any normal person in most other situations try to share their poetry, which they have secretly written – full of emotions, life observations, and personality – people around them will tend to push it all away and start ridiculing the poet, most often by words like those of the teacher I mentioned before, words that are meant to discourage the poet from believing that they are indeed a poet, to stop their efforts to express anything deep.

Why are we doing that?

Firstly, there is the aspect of moving away from your role in society, even your local role in the family or among friends. If you are not already recognized as a poet, but rather as the one who knows how to set up a new TV or install new software, then it would lead to a needed effort from your surroundings to begin recognizing you for more than they do already. And that is uncomfortable for them, it is rocking their boat, so their instincts immediately try to prevent it from happening, to bring everything back to status quo.

Secondly, there are some class-related stereotypes, seeing intellectual behaviour as an upper-class phenomenon not accepted in the working class. And yes, we do have those classes, even though we feel that we are mixed up and now all work at computers, all working with our minds. It makes us, the working class, focus on things, money, savings, more things, and all sorts of practical elements of life, while pushing the emotional aspects – and certainly the institutionalization of them – aside. We can accept the party song or the limerick at the pub, but that’s it. If someone tries to extend themselves into being a part-time or full-time poet, believing that they are entitled to be recognized as such, they are moving out of line and will get mocked back to their place.

Thirdly, there was in the post-war period an extreme focus on science and practical development, circling around various engineering areas, mechanics and electronics. Rockets to the moon, computers, TVs, mobile phones, the Internet, and many other practical, technical areas took seat in our minds. We have during and since that period shaped our ways of thinking around all such technical aspects, and we have come to believe that this is all that matters.

We really do live in a material world, a world of products and the fascination of technological development, but with limited respect for the mind – and in particular, very little respect for emotions. Emotions are even being treated as a “thing” that can be mastered through emotional intelligence. It is not something to feel, no-no, it is something to cynically observe and then deal with in a practical manner.

Poetry doesn’t fit into such a world-view. Poetry is freeing, it is exactly about breaking out of habitual thinking, letting emotions describe themselves in a way that requires the reader’s attention and open interest, the wish to try following the line of thought, sensing the emotion.

It is about trusting others. Trusting that their emotions are relevant for yourself. And trusting yourself in your ability to empathetically take in the expression, twist it and mix it with your own experience, and make it part of your own mind, creating your own inner poetry. Breaking free of your old thoughts. Then you, the reader, also become a poet.

Do you reckon yourself a poet?

There were a period, some 20–30 years ago, where visual books of history were commonly available in the bookshops. You may have seen such one, with maps from different years during history, revealing how nothing stayed the same for very long.

The maps could show different things, such as human genotypes (Neanderthal, Denisova, etc.) and their presumed presence on Earth. Or different animals and where they were possible to find. But the most interesting to me were the maps of nations, countries, empires, whatever such constructions of people + land areas have been called during times.

They didn’t stay the same for long.

Maybe it looked like they did, for the people who lived at the time. A country could cover a certain area during many years, having certain borders with the neighboring countries, and this would then possibly, like today, be seen by people living there as “the correct” borders. Well, perhaps not always, as historical events had shaped these borders, and people do remember history.

They do not all remember it the same way, though, as history tends to be strongly biased. And, hence, from time to time, somebody wants to change the borders. This has often led to expansions of the country during a period, and then a collapse, when one of several things happened:

• some other country thought that it was enough now and fought back

• the expanding country ran out of resources

• the expanding country became too big for one ruler to manage and was ruined by in-fights

• everything was fine but simply faded out, until the surroundings would see the country as an easy prey

It appears to me that, from a historical perspective, countries are like bacteria in a Petri dish: the individual cultures grow, and when they meet each other, they start out having peaceful borders, but sooner or later, one will take over the other. Along the way, only one culture is left, and this then dies out.

Cultures, countries, whatever we choose to call these human constellations, cannot just sit still and enjoy what they have. They want change, and they create it to an extent where it ruins them in the end.

This way, even — or especially — the greatest empire one day becomes nothing but a memory.

Of course, all the people living in such a culture will have lives that, at times, can be with safe and certain surroundings from start to end. This is how we often look at history: “in those days, things were like that”. But more often than not, nothing stays stable for the lifetime of a human being.

At times, which is interesting to see, old countries re-appear from the ashes of those who took them over. Or simply break out again. But they will forever stay in a tense relationship to the other parts. There will always be people there who feel that things belong together, if they have ever been together.

We all want to establish ourselves and grow within the limits of our society, but that is part of the problem: we cannot all grow to the limits. We will limit each other before that happens. Our personal spheres will meet the others, preventing further growth, this leading to infighting and an effective destruction of the society, or some sort of agreement to grab a neighboring country and continue our growth there.

There is very little respect to be found in history. But a lot of personal ambitions.

And every culture seems to end up killing itself.

When studying history, it really makes sense to look at the longer lines. Through the effects in the longer run, we can better see how the studied country and culture was able to provide that personal growth while still maintaining stability both internally and with their neighbors.

The Petri dish cannot be expanded. It is, as it is, and any bacteria culture will reach its limits. And as the human population on Earth has grown, we see something similar happening — humans have expanded to the limits, and they cannot be expanded any further. We have consumed almost all available nutrition and can, in a sense, only survive by taking over other cultures. This, of course, only until one culture has exterminated all others, and then itself is reaching the limits of the planet.

Expanding to Mars seems like a sad attempt to avoid this destiny. A desperate thought, based on an impossible hope, rather than a real attempt to solve the problem.

The best use of history, and the maps of cultural expansion and collapse, would probably be to think out scenarios where the human species could survive without the eternal need for growth. Where we could stay at a number of people that could be sustained by our Petri dish, the Earth, and where we could avoid the eternal attacks on each other’s cultures, leaving room for everybody, but by that, accepting that each of us, also on a personal level, will have limits that are defined by the need to also make room for others.

Studying Petri dish bacteria cultures may even help to understand why this is necessary, and the mentioned maps are kind of that; kind of historical Petri dishes.

I will go hunting for some historical maps books — hopefully they still exist. Hopefully I’m not too late. Maybe you would too? Maybe more people could get engaged in finding the stable life that could allow humanity to survive. Maybe, as an ultimate hope, all people on Earth could some day understand that need.

There have been many people in my life who I admired for their exceptional abilities in one or another direction — often composers or musicians, as I am very much fond of music, but writers, actors, sportsmen and -women, and actually also people who were not doing any of those things that normally would be connected with “a talent” but still managed to behave in a way that not everybody could have done.

I have also seen many times how people have been described with “brilliant”, “very talented”, and other superlatives, without really doing anything that could impress me.

At times, I even found that such people were indeed awful at it, not providing what I would consider good skills. Many singers and other performers would fall into that category.

In such cases, though, I have understood that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, and the same counts for being brilliant.

So, I do recognize that some people are very good at something, maybe even so good that they are unique — nobody in the world will be able to do that. Wouldn’t that mean that they then had a special “talent”?

Not in my opinion. It depends on the definition of “talent”, of course, but just as a giraffe can eat the leaves at the top of a tree, and a frog can catch flies with its tongue, some people have a natural inclination for doing something. Basketball players are often better at the game if they are tall, because the game is constructed in such a way that this is an advantage. People with good eyesight and who are able to see all colors correctly are often better photographers and designers than those who lack those skills.

What a giraffe and a basketball player have in common, is not a talent: it’s a physiological advantage. And physical or psychological advantages help in many other respects, making it easier for some people than others to get success with a sport, art, or other human-made activity.

An animal that is doing what it evolved to do can hardly be said to be talented in this. It can do nothing else, so it is more like “built” for it, if you subscribe to the idea of intelligent design, or, indeed, has evolved to fit into a specific situation. The same animal wouldn’t necessarily be good at other things, hence the old idea of “you can’t judge a fish on its ability to climb trees, or a monkey on its ability to swim”.

What looks like a talent is often just a bodily and/or mental advantage that fits the situation.

Games and sports are made by human people to fit certain ideals.

Basketball was mentioned already, and even if it wasn’t specially designed for tall people, it is much easier for the tall ones to perform, as the baskets are hanging up high and are easier to but the ball in if you can lift your hands up just as high.

Golf is more complex, requiring a number of skills, along with a general good physical condition: you need to be able to swing your arms, so certain shoulder problems will make it difficult for you to play golf. You also need a good eyesight, or someone to help you see what you cannot see yourself, and a control of your muscles, enough for directing the swinging golf club in the right direction.

Singing opera requires a strong voice, which to some extent can be trained but needs a basis to train it from. You need to be able to match a tone that you hear with singing a similar tone, and you should be able to remember the lines, as an opera often requires you to sing for a longer duration without having a possibility to check the libretto. Several additional skills are needed too, making opera a somewhat difficult area to work in.

None of this is a talent. Unless you define long legs as a talent. Or good eyesight.

What makes the person who is excellent at one of these sports or other activities be better than others, is a combination of having the needed abilities in place or having found ways of overcoming them (such as an art painter using their feet instead of their hands to paint), having an understanding of the rules and scope of the activity: what is considered correct and good by the audience, and having enough of education and practice to be able to do it well.

I know that many people like to believe that some of us are born to do something special, better than anybody else. But I have never seen anything pointing in that direction. Not apart from the features that our genes have given us different levels of.

There is, though, another aspect: society and the support from the surroundings. It may be that you have great fingers, a sense of rhythm, and the mentality for practicing until you hit the right tone every time, and yet, you will never become a concert pianist, simply because you have no piano, nobody who can or will sponsor you, or, indeed, no acceptance from your surroundings that this is what you want to do. You maybe be forced to study and work with something else, and may even be punished in different ways for approaching a piano or just talking about it.

It can be even worse, since you may not know that pianos exist or that it could be possible to get such a life/job/career, or you know about this but have no idea that you would be able to do it.

Prodigies appear from time to time, and very young children are attributed for having written operas or done other amazing things, and even if we accept the fact that they are actually doing this themselves, with their own hands, which may not always be the case, they still need to have the needed tools within reach and some surroundings that let them do and support them, mainly by seeing that it happens and telling others about it, but also by ensuring the needed training and possibility to dedicate time for it.

The 3-year-old writing an opera is not a talent: they may be unusually skilled, but are mainly the instruments in the hands of people who want them to appear as prodigies.

Something similar can be the case also for larger children, young people, and adults. They can be driven by people around them to use their skills, get more training, become and be the talent.

This way, “talent” is a level of competence, a level of being, or doing, that comes as a result of dedication and effort, as well as recognition.

Talent is not consistent. It may be that the pianist, basketball player, or writer keeps performing the same all the time, even though this is not typical, but the eyes looking at it may not be the same — and different observers may see different things, different qualities.

This way, someone considered a great talent by some people, can receive negative reviews by others. It happens, that someone often considered talented is mentioned a “talent-less” by someone who is supposed to know — such as a professional reviewer.

I have myself experienced to be called a skilled writer — and yet to have my texts completely shot down and talked about as useless by editors. One of the latter commented something like “I don’t think people like you normally make so many mistakes”, referring to the fact that I am not a native English writer.

My guess is that everybody who is doing something that regularly receives reviews from others will have experienced something like that: being called amazingly good by some and hopelessly bad by others.

There is no talent in this. A talent cannot be both good and bad. The common idea of “talent” is that it is something that differs the person positively from the rest, something that makes the one better. But being better should not be a matter of subjective opinions, sometimes resulting in good reviews, at other times in bad. It should be permanently recognized as good.

But this doesn’t happen to anyone, so talent is not a thing.

The “non-native” comment is about prejudice, and we have a lot of that everywhere in the world. About all kinds of things, such as the country of origin, the “societal level” of your family (class, caste, etc.), skin color, gender, voice pitch, shoe size — you name it. People often cannot look beyond such things, and they value what they see and hear through a filter of prejudices. I would claim that we all have some, even if we genuinely try not to have any. We cannot always look at another person with a blank mind and just take in what they do as equal to what others do. We might be able to rationalize afterward and see how our prejudices have affected our immediate impression, but even that is not always enough to rectify our judgement.

The society we are part of also designates some of the possible activities as more valuable than others, meaning that in some societies, nobody will ever be called a talented golf player, since golf is not accepted there, or even worse, many art forms are directly banned and cannot be mentioned in the same sentence as “talent”. So, talent is only for selected areas. We decide as a society what a person potentially can be talented in, and what not.

In our commercialized Western world, we even combine what we see with what we know about the economical value. Meaning, a chef who is using a cheap brand of knives cannot be talented — “real” talents will know that knives must be expensive to be good, we think. Sports people need to wear accepted brands of cloth, or they even need to have certain, esteemed, sponsors, in order to have a chance to be seen as talents.

“Talent” is in many ways a loaded word, a word connected with status — and in this way, it is as often as not, being used negatively, to tell how much we dislike something, by calling it and its performer “without talent”.

We can enjoy a great performance, and we can admire great skills, great dedication, important initiatives, difficult decisions, and many, many other things.

But we shouldn’t sort these into talented or not. It doesn’t bring anything good to the table.

If you occasionally read the news or posts on social media, you will have noticed that there is a phenomenon much talked about — AI.

Actually, AI is the most talked about topic, being everywhere and being seen as the future for humanity in just about every thinkable way.

As with most new technologies, there is a tendency to overestimate the potential, believing that this is indeed the Philosophers’ Stone. Of course, the technology is promising and has produced surprising results, often making people feel that this really must have something big in it.

But try having a closer look at the AI-generated illustration of this article: Do you see it? While, at a first glance, everything seems good and well-made, a closer look will reveal that most of what is in the rich picture is indeed nonsense.

The text elements are almost all wrong, either being graphically distorted or wrongly spelled, or both. In fact, it is clear that the generative AI producing this didn’t see it as text, didn’t try to put meaning in it and correct errors — it just tried to repeat some visual patterns in an artistically free way.

The image parts are almost just as wrong, even thought that may be harder to spot, as we are used to slightly distorted images. Our human image recognition capabilities are trained in seeing what isn’t there, fill in the blanks, so to speak, and to correct small errors. This, as a result of the limitations of our vision capabilities — our eyes. They do not provide us with a complete and detailed picture of the world, even though we often believe that, so the brain has to step in and assist, providing whatever meaning might be missing from what information the eyes supply.

That image recognition flaw in the human cognitive systems is beneficial for a fast-moving life on the savanna or in the jungle, as we need to be able to react fast, cannot wait for all the details to be clarified. So, the different parts of us collaborate to produce an understanding of the surrounding reality. This understanding will mostly be partly wrong, but it is sufficient for a high percentage of us to survive, not being eaten by predators and ourselves finding food, in part by catching other prey.

We don’t need to see details, we need to understand details.

In this way, the generative AI created images is really a good simulation of the human capabilities, or — and that’s the catch here — part of it. It provides more or less the same kind of distorted image of the world as our eyes do, but it doesn’t combine it with the mental processing, as the human brain would do it.

So, we get an incomplete, erroneous picture out of it.

As for the graphical parts, as mentioned, it is not even certain that you have noticed the problems, because you are used to filling in the blanks from graphical elements. It doesn’t matter to your brain if your eyes see a lion with three or four legs — what matters is that it looks like a lion, and you understand that, meaning that you can immediately decide to run.

But the text is a different matter. There, we are used to seeing something perfect. And even though we can easily overlook a typo or other smaller problems with a text, even in a large scale, as known from various fun exercises that often circulate on social media, often under a headline like “95% of people cannot read this — can you?”, and you can then feel special because you can (as can most people). An example here:

It may take a moment to adjust to the strange shape of the text, and it is probably easier for those who have English as their native language, as this is the “underlying” language used. This kind of distorted text illustrates how your brain can adjust to an image of the world that isn’t perfect — it can quickly replace elements and larger fragments of the image with something from memory.

So far, so good. The example distorted text follows some pattern rules. That’s why your brain can decode it.

The text in the AI-generated image, however, is often a mix of different graphical text elements, and it is not always clear what the origin was, as it may not be one simple origin. It is just a mix of different texts.

Now consider what happens with other kinds of AI-generated output.

You get some text from ChatGPT, for instance, and it looks like nice text. It does that because ChatGPT contains mechanisms for spelling and grammar control, making sure that some of the structures of language are being observed.

We are used to seeing well-written text as more correct than badly written text. This is a problem for dyslectic people entering social media, and when the blogging wave was over us, it led to many blogs being ignored by readers, simply because the bloggers behind them weren’t capable of creating correct text, and that made the readers believe that they were stupid or unknowing. Needless to say that this phenomenon is also limiting the success of non-native writers of any language.

A perfect writing, on the other hand, will lead you to believe that the contents are correct. You get convinced by the AI’s well-spokenness.

So, when you read the beautiful text that ChatGPT wrote for you in a couple of seconds, you can easily get so amazed that you forget to check if the contents really are correct. It is all well-written, so it leads you to believe that it must be correct.

And that is the big danger with generative AI.

Very often, the written text is a bad as the AI-generated image above. We just don’t see it. And if we use these texts in professional contexts, such as for making business decisions, or presenting evidence and references cases in court (as a famous example showed), we may actually create a very problematic situation.

I believe that every single person, who ever wrote anything themselves, have been considering if what they wrote was correct. This, however, doesn’t seem to happen when we make AI write for us. Maybe we intuitively compare the situation with one where another person is writing for us, thereby, just as intuitively, expecting that the quality step has been taken?

Whatever is the problem now, needs to be corrected!

Anyone using AI-generated text really should read through it before distributing it or making decisions on its basis, and they should check every claim made.

AI isn’t aware of whether it speaks the truth or not. It doesn’t have any ability to understand the difference between truth and lie. It just repeats what it has seen elsewhere, mixed up to a new shape. And that new shape may even contain a mix, that, obviously spoken, is pure gibberish.

Words may follow each other in a correct order, but the meaning behind it is completely missing. AI doesn’t know anything, doesn’t mean anything, doesn’t want to tell anything — it is simply a mechanism that generates nice patterns, just like you would get from a kaleidoscope, in graphical or text format.

Beautiful, but without any inherent meaning.

Fascinating, but for no good reasons.

Maybe they no longer exist, but you surely know what I’m referring to: The cork boards, bulletin boards, pin boards or whatever people usually called them.

You could have one at the office, hanging important pieces of paper on them (with your computer password, or the phone number of the pizza delivery), but they were also popular in some shops, mostly supermarkets, near the entrance.

People would try to sell their old bicycle or coffee machine through an ad on such a bulletin board, but many other messages were shared this way.

The concept actually worked quite well. There would be a reasonable amount of posts there, and the supermarket staff would now and then take a round and remove the oldest posts, so that only the most recent and still relevant were there, possible for interested customers to overview.

Of course, in some cases there wouldn’t be this friendly clean-up, so the bulletin boards often became a mess.

Now fast-forward to modern times. We do everything on the computer or, perhaps even more, on the mobile phone.

Any such bulletin will be put in a Facebook group for this kind of bulletins, or people will just throw away that old bicycle because they don’t know where to announce it for sale.

We live differently now, and most contact we have with other people seems to be through some kind of electronic device.

Social media has entered, and that is where we post everything.

But think about it for a moment: how many people would hang up something on the bulletin board in your local supermarket per day, when it still happened?

10? 100?

No matter how popular the place was, you would have a chance to get your message through. Some people would see it, and perhaps they would call you and buy your bicycle.

When you post something on social media, you are up against millions of people.

They will not all post in your bubble — the social media will somehow fragment the users and show a post to some of them only, but as you know from your doomscrolling sessions, there are definitely many posts to read. Many more than you can ever manage to read, no matter how long you keep scrolling.

Now imagine your post being put there, in the stream. Others will doomscroll just like you did, and your post will appear somewhere along the way, if they continue long enough.

Chances are, however, that most of them will never see your post, because there are too many others to look at.

Those who do see your post may be in the other end of the country. Or in some other country. So, even if your bicycle announcement may be seen, the readers may not want to buy on it.

What you can sell to everybody, though, is something electronic — something non-substantial. An e-book, for instance.

And that has led to an explosion of e-books for sale. So many, that the price needs to be set very low for it to work, and the most common price is, indeed, $0.00.

An e-book has no economical value, but you can sell it, for zero dollars.

Your old bicycle does have a value, but you cannot sell it, because you cannot get in touch with potential buyers. So, in effect, it has less value than the e-book. Less than something which is for free.

Try zooming out a bit, to get the bigger picture. You’ll see millions of free e-books announced, millions of other posts added to the social media bulletin board, and millions of people not being the slightest interested in any of it — that’s why they are doomscrolling; hoping to find something else that is interesting.

If someone told you that this is where your fortune lies: just post something into this mess, let it compete with millions of other posts about the attention of people who do not care — would you think that they were sane?

It is somehow an advanced form of madness to believe that adding even more noise to the inferno will be a way of earning money.

It’s a dead end.

The concept has developed from being a way for a small group of friends to share information into an all-comprising massive wall of information, some of it not fit-for-fight at all, never really being finished — you have seen this kind of posts, I assume; just fragments of information, like “I’m going to have a cup of coffee”, which doesn’t lead to anything else than a disruption of your thought stream.

Some other posts are well-made, but there are just too many of them, and they may be in the other end of the country, so to speak, telling about a topic that would be for a different group of people, not you.

Enter the gurus.

As it is clear that some people during the short life of the social media have been able to earn a lot of money on it, these gurus, coaches, whatever they call themselves, will have an easy time claiming that it is possible.

It clearly is possible, just look at this or that person who is a mogul, earning millions per month on posting to social media. Maybe the guru is themselves such one, at least somewhat — a small mogul. Trustworthy, because they clearly know how to do this, or else they wouldn’t be so strongly on their way to success, would they?

Each of them carefully craft a set of things you must do, and each of them know quite well that you wouldn’t believe them if they said that you could do it in a month. There must be a reasonable, trustworthy, amount of time between zero, now, and the the target.

For two reasons: one is trust; it has to look plausible. Most people have been through activities in life, such as a study, that simply took an amount of time with no shortcuts possible. It’s an established concept — success takes time.

The other reason is that the guru wants to sell you something on a subscription basis, and they want that to continue for a long period, so that they can earn more money.

If you look at the logic in it: The guru is apparently successful in doing something, but has decided to spend their time instead on teaching you how to become just as successful. Hmm… why are they not spending their time on doing what they are good at, running after the guru’ing instead?

Because, this is what they are trying to be good at. They have decided that the way to earn money is to tell people what the way to earn money is. And as this is a long-term activity, nobody will suspect anything being wrong if it doesn’t work right away.

Also, most of the reason for success or failure is on you. The guru just tells you how you can apply some tools, but it is up to you to use these consistently and wisely, paving your own way to success. Because, they can only show you the way, not walk it for you. Your destiny is your own.

This also means that the tools can be anything, really. It’s not the guru’s fault if it doesn’t work. It’s your fault. And not even that, because, if it doesn’t kill you, it’ll make you stronger. Either you win or you learn.

Guru’ing is a safe kind of business, delivering fluff for you to shape a life from. Any substance is for you yourself to add. That’s your success factor.

So, what do these social media gurus tell you?

• Consistency is king

• Keep publishing, even if nobody is reading it

• It’s not about the amount of readers, it’s about who reads it

• Even if there are seemingly no readers, they are there, just not saying anything

• You can publish anything, just keep it short and simple

• You must publish a lot

• You shouldn’t publish a lot

• You should focus on what you are good at, your special expertise

• It doesn’t matter what you focus on, just do it consistently

• You need a niche, something that is only yours

• You don’t need a niche, just make each post engaging

• Etc.

You can make these advices yourself. They are nothing but fluff.

A substantial advice would be, as an example:

Write 200 word long posts to publish twice a day at 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. in your own time zone, about the use of vacuum cleaners in medical laboratory environments. Make sure to study the topic carefully before you start. Have an e-book ready to sell that describes, in 200 pages, how different ways of using vacuum cleaners can affect the laboratory work in positive and negative ways, with real-life examples and an exclusive list of reference customers to contact for their experiences.

You get the idea? Substantial advice must be more specific, it must be suitable for making a plan to follow, that will lead to success, if done well.

This particular example advice may not work well, but if you are going to move forward successfully, you need to know what you are doing and have a clear idea on how to do it and what your goal is.

A consistent posting of any kind of crap, niche or not, will perhaps build you a following, but it won’t make you rich.

Using those modern bulletin boards requires you to hit right with a message that matches someone’s needs, this leading to something actionable. Otherwise, they will just scroll over it and never even notice that it was there.

However, you can catch attention with other stuff, and this may make people click on like or otherwise react to your message. The social media algorithm, corresponding to the supermarket staff cleaning the bulleting board for only relevant messages to be there, will allow for more people to see your posts going forward — and those who reacted, will more likely see your next posts.

And this is where the jokes come in.

On some of the fast-scrolling media, jokes have become a great way to catch people’s attention. Especially if they are visual. Cartoons are great, and with your wise, short, comment added to it, people may even remember that the joke came from you.

If you mix in this kind of contents in your flow, you may, on those platforms, build up a following who likes to read your posts.

But the jokes will most likely not make you a billionaire. In fact, if you are in a position where you need to learn what to do on social media to become “as popular as the most popular”, you are already out too late.

Every social media platform has an introduction phase where a bunch of invited, initial influencers have been given the privilege to run this up. They will be supported by the platform, having an easy time getting seen and being promoted in every way, and they may become very rich from it.

But after that, the platform is focused on dragging in as many ordinairy users as possible. They already have the wolfs, now they need the sheep. As many as possible.

In order to boost the process of attracting and dragging in the ordinairy users, they tell the stories about the initial, successful influencers on the platform, and they allow for a second wave to build up a reasonable business by telling others how to do it. For a while.

On all the mature platforms, we have seen how some of the top influencers keep being promoted but others have been pushed out, and the second wave of influencers, the first line of gurus, have been giving their time in order to then being pushed out.

Left are all the ordinairy users of which a lot believe that they can do the same as one of the first two waves, leading many people into trying out their luck as gurus.

But it is too late, as the platform doesn’t need that anymore and won’t support this third wave in any way.

The jokes, however, are still attracting people while they are doomscrolling, and they can make a basis for further communication. Just not into the big earnings, as this is an illusion that has never been true — a construct with the help of the initial influencers, to act as marketing for a platform that basically doesn’t want to help you become rich, it rather wants the opposite:

The platform wants you to pay with your money, attention to adverts, or your data, for being there, trying and trying to become rich, never understanding that all that really works is — a joke.

A Substack Notes user shared the idea that Notes was used by many people in a meaningless way — a way that was an attempt to help the individual grow, but with limited real value provided:

And there is definitely something there!

Notes was developed as an attempt by Substack to offer a communication around the articles, meant to be brief and inspirational, as a means to attract new subscribers.

The feature then itself added another measure, next to the subscribers, which is the followers. Such followers are following your notes, like subscribers are following your articles.

Another layer, another level, another activity to focus on, next to so many others for those who want to — grow.

Growing, as it has evolved in the social media world, is about building and expanding an amount of followers and subscribers, to become a popular person — or brand — who can monetize themselves.

And for someone like me who see 0–5 readers on every note made in that system, there is really not much growth to expect, but for others, there could be a significant gain from posting even simple memes: There are regularly people who carefully share the outcome of an unusually popular Notes post, having got perhaps several hundred likes, and they mostly tell that they gained a dozen or more new subscribers, at times even paid subscribers.

That’s growth!

If you can do that every day, week after week, it can be the “X factor” that makes the difference between just being here on Substack, respectively being a success here.

As part of the dialogue with , I wrote the below:

Or, copied here, so that you can read the full text:

I agree that meaning makes sense :)

But social media by large is about posting such that will have no or little meaning to most people. A quite mechanical and “too easy” approach to communication, when comparing to almost every other approach.

Nevertheless, billions of people are doing it, and they must get some kind of fulfilment out of it, some kind of satisfaction that can be said to contribute to some kind of meaning for them.

I am personally somewhat astonished over X, Bluesky, these Notes, and everything else that features small snippets of almost nothing, in an endless scroll. But then again, it’s a bit like life: You can go for a walk in the city, or in the forest, or on the beach, perhaps, and most of what you see there won’t catch your attention. Now and then, however, something does. And that something may be the meaning for you that makes the walk worthwhile. Alternatively, the lack of such meaningful details could by itself help bringing you the relaxation and meditation you were seeking, this then being meaningful to you.

Whatever looks pointless from the outside could, potentially, hold value for the one on the inside.

The point of this analysis is that life in general consists of many details that by themselves are meaningless, unless you look for a meaning in them. And if you look for one, you’ll most likely find one.

People find meaning in birds’ singing, in sunshine, in staring through whatever may be in the sight-line without really seeing it, or in simply closing the eyes and seeing nothing at all.

They also find meaning in memes, silly anecdotes, and phrases of politeness and optimism, like “Hi all, what a beautiful day today, sunshine and warm weather”.

Meaning is connected to a situation, a frame, in which the meaning fills out an otherwise empty space, or a movement, a push, that takes this frame to a new place, allowing for you to see life from a different perspective. No matter how diminutive or seemingly irrelevant a post on Notes may seem to some, it may for others be exactly that spot that was otherwise missing in the picture of life, or that push, that made life evolve in the most needed way.

They can be notes of love or hate, or made of thin air. A word. A colourful picture, a dark shadow.

While it does feel silly that so many people spend so much time on such simple things, doomscrolling, as a modern word tries to categorise the processes of seeking something to rest your eyes and your soul on in a purely digital universe, it is at the same time fully understandable that they are looking for something. And that some of them are looking for ways to participate, say something, not just look. Perhaps initiate a dialogue, or just feel that rapport, I wrote about recently in another article:

When pointed out a problem that is rather common — one we have all seen as social media users, it made me think a bit.

It’s about likes. And it’s about all other kinds of reactions that we can show when being active on social media. Because that is one of the social elements there — to react to what each other is writing or otherwise posting.

However, as Linda mentioned in her article, only very few people actually do that. In her case, a quick study showed that 6% of the readers clicked on like. But why not all? What prevents them from doing it?

Hello, Writer!

The Problem With Both Medium And Substack Isn't The Platform

Tell you something that gets under my skin. Write a post that over two thousand people read. Gets shared and restacked dozens of times. Brings in dozens of new subscribers. Notice that 129 people clicked the heart. Quick math. Six percent…

Read more

2 years ago · 1011 likes · 297 comments · Linda Caroll

My first reaction was this (copied here from the original reply, as the Substack editor will not embed it):

You are right! It is a strange thing. On the other hand, we don't say thanks for the water we take from the water tap, or for the electricity we use. I know that these things aren't necessarily for free, but I'm just saying that there are things around us that we take for granted - often, we don't even think about getting them, they just slip into our lives unnoticed.

When you say that there is a limited amount of dollars to give away each day, it may be true also for thank you - we may get tired of saying that. In traffic, for instance, we don't say thank you whenever someone is not running over us. We just expect that, and even when people are almost hitting us, we don't thank them for stopping in time - it is more likely that we yell at them for almost hitting us.

Writing is everywhere. We take it in like we breathe the air or listen to the birds singing. At times we like it, but there are other times where we don't like the smell of the air or when we find the birds too noisy - or when we just don't get a feeling of "thank you" out of reading something, or what else we get or take from others.

All that said, I do find that we really should spend the second it takes to click the like. Because, why not? We feel better ourselves when giving, even if it such a small gift as a click on an small symbol. A symbolic gift.

What would happen if the social media platforms were opposite - meaning that like was clicked automatically, and we would have to un-click it if we didn't like the text? I cannot know it as I have never seen such a concept, but I have a feeling that you would then get 94% likes and 6% un-clicked likes. Because it may all be about what we don't think and do more than what we do think and do.

We read the text and like it along the way, but then we move on to something else before we have finished all the administrative things, such as studying the panel at the end of the text with different things we could have clicked on.

I tend to believe that it is mostly this. Like we leave the water tap or pull the cable from the electric outlet and then quickly move on to something else, already having our thoughts there, just hastily bringing our bodies in spatial sync with the thoughts.

Hence, there may be no statement whatsoever in the non-like. Just a moving mind and attention.

In other words, people do not think too deeply about the behaviour, and they do not experience each read of an article on social media as something so special that it calls for an action.

It isn’t something to say thank you for.

I think it is about the fact that this is media. It is not people we have in front of us, where we will be expected to smile, look at them, say something. Media, we just consume. Media is made by people who enjoy pushing it out on us, we think, so it is their song, not ours. Hell, they won’t even notice if we react to it or not, will they?

We feel small compared to media. Even if social media has given us all a voice, we also understand that this voice isn’t really being heard by anyone. And a popular post will have many likes already, so who will care if we add ours to the lot? Also, such a quick and cheap gesture can’t have any significance for a popular writer.

It also influences the situation that, most often, there will be many comments — and while the original writer may react to some of these, many or most go seemingly unnoticed.

In fact, it can be rather depressing to be a social media consumer. Sometimes, reacting feels like shouting at the football game we watch on TV. Nobody but the grouchy neighbours will ever notice, and they will not think good about us for it.

Hence, lots of reasons for not reacting on anything on social media. To those come the distance in perception that we have: The writer hopes for reactions after having spent time and energy on creating something, publishing it, and checking for results in the shape of reactions. But the readers see it as a few seconds of entertainment, if even that — they may actually find it stressful that exactly this post, along with many more, distract them from what they really should have been doing in life. That this post contributes to their doomscrolling and distancing from real life.

So, to the extent that there is a message in not liking, it could be that we want to show ourselves how little we like all of this, all the required attention to everything, of which there is too much.

Too much of everything.

Isn’t that a valid reason for cutting off some of it? And yet, we can’t. We are addicted to consume just a bit more, just a few more minutes, posts, memes, cat videos…

Being stressed of all this, we react in negative ways. We may even complain about social media to everyone we can find who have ears — or complain about the misery on social media themselves, often for deaf ears.

And we’ll get no reactions from anyone, because nobody wants to hear about our perceived negative experience of life. They want positive input only.

So they exactly do not react on our criticism of social media, because they find that we are adding to their stress.

In other words, we are all annoying each other on social media. It is the very nature of social media, because there is too much of everything, and we can’t cope with it all. Our only way of complaining is, in reality, to show a passive-aggressive behaviour by not supporting others, by treating them as part of that big machine that spits out tons of pointless information 24 hours a day.

The way to getting more likes, more real reactions, is probably to skip social media altogether and talk to people in real life instead.

Even in real life, we will see how people will try to maintain an own space around them, into which they will not just happily allow any statement made by others: they will be protective about that space, and they will balance what they smile at and what they frown upon. Also, if there is too much trying to enter their private space, they will ignore some of it.

So, even in real life, we will often speak for deaf ears, seemingly. But we can see the facial expressions of people, and we can often enter into a real dialogue with them, one where we listen to them, not just tell them things.

And perhaps that is the real, underlying, issue here: that social media often become a one-way attempt of communication, meeting the natural resistance to such, as people do not feel heard, do not feel that the other party shows any real interest in them.

One-way communication is part of the perceived fake nature of social media, which people often react upon. They simply cannot relate to others as human beings if these others do not behave like human beings. And that is not only about AI and chatbots, it is also about the lack of listening, the lack of rapport.

Which, I think, explains why cat videos, funny cartoons, and all kinds of lightweight, often humoristic contents seem to catch people’s attention better than serious attempts to tell something important.

It is not about wanting entertainment, it is about wanting rapport. Laughing together is rapport. Speaking to our direct emotions is rapport. Not demanding us to listen to complex explanations, is rapport.

And when there is rapport, we happily push the button - we “like”.

Several hints have appeared during recent days about an old thought: when we choose our path forward, do we then have some equally choosable options, or are we somehow restricted?

In order words: do we have a truly free will?

One of the hints appeared in a post on Substack Notes:

Now, this was building the platform but led to a reader responding like this:

And that is in itself an interesting way of thinking: that the components of a bridge might have a will that makes them stick together as a bridge. An old philosophy of everything in nature having some kind of soul.

Little children tend to believe in this: when they have tried to navigate a set of knife and fork, tying their shoelaces, or whatever they are learning to use at the moment but still do not master, they may at some point throw it along the floor while shouting “stupid fork!” or “stupid shoes!”

Computer users also do the same thing, no matter the age, when suddenly the computer opens a popup while they are in the middle of writing some brilliant thinking, leading to the cursor and the keyed-in being everywhere else than where it was supposed to be. A “stupid computer!” has been heard more than once in such situations, or, in my personal case, “damn Microsoft!”, because I am fully aware that it is in fact Microsoft who have done this to me, knowing how annoying I would find it.1

We want to impersonate things. Somehow, it is natural for people to do that, and we then teach children that things do not have a will, it is not the thing that behaves badly. Rather, it is the one using the thing who just uses it in the wrong way. Training, patience, and careful attention to what you are doing will then bring you much further than throwing things on the floor while shouting at them.

But then again, what if… Spiritism exists for a reason. As we do not always see the full scope of connections between all that is happening in a highly interconnected world, we then try to look at just a fraction of the world. This is also what science is doing: isolating the sub-system that will have a closed circle of causes and effects. Only, nature isn’t a divisible system — it is really all connected.

“When a butterfly moves its wings on the other side of Earth, it may lead to a storm here later”, a popular saying goes. I think that some scientists have countered that claim, but systems thinking, as this is part of, does have a value in everything we do. Everything really is connected.

So, when you see a pattern in nature, and it reminds you of intelligence, maybe even relatable to a person who is no longer physically among us but whom you remember — then it is easy to wonder if that person is somehow represented by the thing.

Or you may consider the thing to have its own soul in itself or living in it, such as when the Icelandic people hear a rumbling in the mountain, they may think that a troll lives there, or when a branch of a tree seemingly decides to break off right in front of you — not yesterday or tomorrow, but right at the moment when you pass it.

Of course, not all such stories about things having a soul or a spirit within are actually meant to be taken seriously. Sometimes, I’m sure, people have told such stories for the purpose of entertaining each other.

Fairy tales got dragons and magic, not necessarily because the storyteller believed in that, but rather because it made an interesting story. It made the children who were listening to it, wonder about all the amazing things there could exist in this world, even if they knew that these particular wondrous things were just a story. Just made up.

Sagas and other stories about gods ruling the world may have had similar backgrounds, even though we today like to believe that the ancient Vikings believed in Oden and Tor, and and the ancient Greeks believed in all the famous 12 gods of the Olympus.

But now to the free will. When we see things in nature, seemingly lying planless around, such as the universe accidentally spread them and stacked them, whatever is the situation, through millions of years, we can easily feel that nature is a wild and hostile place — no help at all. But then we get an idea: what if we rearrange things a bit, then we’ll have a house, or a bridge, or whatever our imagination can lead us to thinking.

Where exactly is that imagination coming from?

I wrote, as a reply to the above-mentioned reply on Notes, in two steps — a reply, and then a reply to my reply:

My point is that whenever we are to make a choice, whenever we try to see which options we have — then there aren’t an endless amount of opportunities. The opportunities may be many, but what we see in front of us does have dome kind of order, even when it looks chaotic. That order matches something in our minds, like the pattern I mentioned, which then even may remind us of a person we knew. Or make us think about the stories about trolls and dragons we once heard.

Whatever we experienced previously, will have an influence on what we see now. And whatever anybody ever told us, would be influenced what they had seen. So, what someone once saw will affect what we now see as a potential order from chaos - our imagination, our creativity.

In an article by , some clever thoughts are introduced about how we see things — how we treat the options we have in life. Giving up something isn’t necessarily the same as failing or losing, it can be the exact opposite, since it leads to new possibilities. Davor gives an example with his daughter’s dilemma: should she continue spending four hours a week studying guitar playing, which she dislikes, or should she give that up and do some of the things she likes more? He uses this example to illustrate what I mention just before, that giving up something can actually be equal to winning from the new opportunities it leads to.

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a year ago · 10 likes · 7 comments · Davor Katusic

But it made me consider some aspects of choosing in a comment (text copied here, as the Substack editor doesn’t want to embed it):

Very clever words! I agree all the way but would like to add two things:

1. Your 8-year-old daughter may find a third way: rather than continuing or giving up, she could aim for a plan that will bring her to a new phase in her guitar studies. Let's say that 1/2 year like now would bring her to a level that allows for cutting down the lessons to two times half hour per week, which will still be useful and bring her forward at that time, with the skills she has achieved by then. It will, with some efforts now, allow her to spend more time a bit later on other things that she likes. This is just an example of the thinking, you and she can probably better evaluate what will work and what not. But it is not just about continuing or quitting, it is about choosing the path, also for a while ahead.

2. Both your daughter and everybody else will get advice from the surroundings, and will be guided very much by that. Sometimes seeking this herself, other times not. There will also be demands and decisions that arise from lack of knowledge, etc., so there is not necessarily a free choice to go the winning or the loosing way, as it will be perceived, there will be bigger challenges choosing one way than another. We do not have a 100% free will. We cannot just do what we want. And we are not personally responsible for everything we end up doing. A lot of it is to follow orders or fit in to a pattern that has been defined by others.

What I am basically saying here, is that 1) we can only choose the solution to any dilemma that we can see, but there may be others, and 2) the universe does limit us, and so does everything in it. So even if we can see a third or a fourth option, it may not be possible at all, or it may simply be unreasonably complicated, or it may be considered dangerous, stupid, or whatever to go with one or more of the options, which leads us to choosing something else.

We get advice. We act upon our knowledge. And we try to do what looks reasonable, but we can almost never just pick and choose from all thinkable options. We are restricted by our surroundings, and guided or misguided by whatever people around us or even what the nature or the universe somehow seems to see as the right solution.

So back to the bridge that maybe built itself: when someone 900 years ago decided to build that bridge out of those stones, in that spot, with that shape, it was probably to a very large extent the result of the way the stones were lying around, the way the river was floating, the weather, the life situation, the advice given to the person through their life, and many other such details.

The bridge, therefore, probably wasn’t really built out of anything like a free will: it was built as an almost inevitable result of the circumstances. And the stones had their fair share in that set of circumstance, which you could say was the same as a fair share in the decision.

With this kind of thinking, the bridge might actually have built itself, just using the convenient presence of a human being to make it happen.