Where do you look up things?

Growing up, from baby to toddler to child, one day there comes this question: „Where do you look up things?” Because clearly at some point parents and uncles and aunts have outlived their usefulness. And vice versa, anyone who figured out how to pay for their mortgages and juggle family, jobs, hobbies and friends successfully, has not much room left to answer a constant stream of „Why?”, „What is this?”, „What if?”.

I grew up without the Internet. However, at the time we had books, and my father’s book shelves did nicely. We had a big medical book with two foldable maps of the body and its organs, which could explain all diseases and their remedies. We had one big book for civil law, where I looked up whether or not I am allowed to use my shortcut across our neighbour’s garden (law books are a disappointment, really). And we had a big Encyclopedia printed in sans-serif, with color pictures. I liked the sheer size of the thing, and the smooth white coating. Next to this modern Encyclopedia we had the 24 volume edition of Der Brockhaus. Not as fun, and far less pleasant to flip through, but a must have for any educated middle class family. And then there were hundreds of books on psychology, philosophy, self-improvement, self-help, cooking, and history.

Growing up, from child to young adult, one day there come these questions: „Who decides what goes into an Encyclopedia? What into a Newspaper?” Because clearly it can’t contain everything, and certainly not every viewpoint. And why are some people put into a more favourable light than others?

I’m more exposed than ever

Ali Abdaal pulls his biggest smile and tells me straight to my face: „I’ve become a millionaire! In just two years and with as little as a few hours of work per week!” He swears blind that he knows how crazy that sounds, but promises over and over again: „if you keep watching my videos and if you buy my online courses you can do the same!”

Ali is probably not even lying about his wealth and stellar success. I hear people „making it” left and right. With social distancing and increased screen time I am hard exposed every day to the cheerful faces of marketeers with off the charts diet-success, creme de la creme cooking and craftsman skills, and soul-crushing Bitcoin/Gamestop/Stock market earnings.

The forever-young avatars on my screens, with their perfect hair and perfect teeth and perfect smiles and perfect bodies keep promising all sorts of things: health, wealth, strength, fame, art-skills, houses with great architecture, or even: plain happiness. If only I keep watching their videos, and keep buying their books and courses, I would be able to make it too. With just a few hours of work per week I too could have it all, they bark from my screens.

And the longer I let them bark at me, the fainter my spirit becomes. They drain my trust and hope right out of my eyes. I’m more exposed than ever. I need to chose well whom I allow to touch my soul.

 

Interactive, responsive, proactive

It wasn’t my first choice to move to the remote countryside. To be more precise, it wasn’t my choice at all. Even less so since it was the kind of countryside that wasn’t particularly welcoming to people who moved there from other parts of the country (or even worse, from abroad). My father moved us there because he would make more business contacts and further his career. The company he used to work for had their headquarters there, in one of the small towns. And from there you could drive into near-by Germany and Switzerland. A good location for a company that produces packaging materials. In summary, my father spent a lot of time commuting and travelling. But it did buy him his dream: a remote standing mansion on the foot of a mountain with a great view onto a lake.

Unfortunately, his career move had the opposite effect for me: isolation, social as well as educational disadvantage. But at that time, as a pre-teenager back in the 1980s I didn’t know that yet. Instead, I thought I’m already doing pretty well as a lone anthropologist – spending my afternoons strolling through nature, and in the mornings at school I was watching the peculiar behaviour of what I later thought might just be the most reserved citizenry in central Europe.

Oh. „Why am I writing this?” I ask myself.

It was there, on the countryside, that I witnessed a few new words popping up. Before that I thought words just existed. Much like the forest and the bees just existed. But the occurrence of new words made it clear to me that words are not a given, they are created. Apart from the words that were particular to the local countryside accents, these were words I had not heard anyone use before, and I observed people trying them on. My two best examples:

a. In my school, which was a slab of concrete and had empty tunnels as hallways which could have been the inspiration for the computer game Doom, one day I suddenly heard some kids call each other „ego”. This went on over the course of a week. Everyone was using the word „ego” up and down all day. „You’re an ego.”, ”You’re the bigger ego.”, „You don’t even know what that means!”, „You don’t even know yourself!” (which was, actually, the truth). By the end of the week the buzz died down, and even though nobody gave (or was given, for that matter) a proper definition of the word „ego”, everyone seemed to have settled with the opinion that „ego” has to mean something like „selfish”. But it was the much cooler sounding word, and the cool kids carried it over into our pop cultural heritage.

b. One of my first computer games I got was from Activision, and on the package it said in big letters: INTERACTIVE. It was like one of the main features of this game. I didn’t understand that word, and I couldn’t find a person to explain it to me either. I can’t blame my parents for their lack of English language skills, but my school’s English teacher was of no help either, that was the real bummer. Therefore I went to the local library. I scanned through dozens of books and magazines to find the answer. In hindsight a good thing. The explanation was this: before the advent of Radio and Television everything was interactive. But nobody knew that everything was interactive, because EVERYTHING was.

At that time, in the 1980s, I couldn’t share these observations with anyone. Nobody cared to listen to me. And if someone did, the best response I would get was „You are strange”, but what I usually got was „You’re not from around here, are you?” I was not upset that nobody liked to be interactive with me. I was not sad. Not even disappointed. Yet.

But isn’t that interesting? Words like „reactive”, „responsive”, „proactive” are greatly useful words nowadays, and people appreciate them and the concepts behind them.

With COVID-19 we are strongly restricted in traveling, but… God bless the Internet and video chat. When meeting online we do not blame each other for being from different places. Nobody is „from around here” anymore.

There’s more to it

There’s more to the colour green, than green just being green. The same could be said about… maybe everything?

When we look at a seemingly simple thing, for example, standing on both feet, we can see it as something simple and self-explanatory. Or we could use it to enter a limitless field of research, play, content creation, discovering beauty, happiness even.

A paradox

Whenever you turn your head without turning it, you will improve how you turn your head.

Technically, you can turn your head without turning it. You do this by locking your head position, and turning everything (shoulders, torso, pelvis) but your head. Paradoxically, this will improve how you turn your head.

What hurts and what comforts

Pain or comfort, tell those two apart, chose one over the other. Every time you make that choice you redefine who you are, in physical as well as mental health. Scientists call that a T-Maze.

„In behavioral science, a T-maze is a simple maze used in animal cognition experiments. It is shaped like the letter T, providing the subject, typically a rodent, with a straightforward choice.” – from Wikipedia

Learning opposites

As babies, already, we learn to tell opposites apart: close – near, up – down, dark – light, involving – excluding, …

Some opposites are more difficult to learn: left – right, supportive – damaging,   these more difficult ones need more life experience to be learned. They are not inherently incompatible binary relationships. 

For example, something that’s to the left for you, is to the right for a person who is standing in front of you facing you. Something can be a little bit more, or a little bit less, to the right. And something that’s doing damage to you, might have something in it that’s to your benefit.