When Dissent Becomes Conformity

Modern Western societies have a peculiar relationship with dissent.

We admire the person who questions. Schools teach critical thinking. Universities celebrate independent minds. Companies want employees who “challenge assumptions.” Liberal societies understand themselves as communities of autonomous individuals rather than obedient subjects.

The idea reaches back to the Enlightenment. Kant gave it its famous formulation: Sapere aude — have the courage to use your own understanding.

The word courage matters. Thinking for yourself becomes interesting precisely when doing so is uncomfortable. It is easy to tell someone to question authority in the abstract. It is considerably harder when the authority in question is your government, your employer, your profession, your university, your friends, or simply everybody whose respect you would rather keep.

There is a German word for courage that comes without such a price: Gratismut. Literally, something like “courage for free.” It describes the bravery of taking a supposedly courageous position when taking it costs you nothing. You challenge an authority everybody around you already dislikes or defend an opinion for which your own group will applaud you.

There may be nothing wrong with the position itself. The interesting question is why expressing it should count as courage.

There are, I think, two different problems here. The first concerns what becomes thinkable. The second concerns what becomes courageous.

Consider an ordinary workplace.

Your Thing Is Kind of Slow

A few days ago, the timing chain on my motorcycle snapped.

The bike had very low mileage, absurdly low mileage for that kind of failure, but there it was: dead. So suddenly I was back on a bicycle.

One evening the shops were already closed, and I had to ride to a 24-hour Migros, one of Switzerland’s big supermarket chains, instantly recognizable here by its orange signs. A 24-hour Migros is the sort of place that seems partly designed to reassure you that civilization has not completely collapsed after 8 p.m.

On the way back, I saw an older man in a battery-powered wheelchair struggling in the middle of the road. Something had fallen, or he had stopped for some reason, and I helped him a little.

His wheelchair was moving painfully slowly.

So I told him.

“Your thing is kind of slow.”

He said, “Yeah, I’m out of breath.”

The Product Is Shopping Too

Not long ago, I went on a date with a woman.

We took a walk around a lake.

She was in her early fifties and had three children. One of them was fourteen, right in the middle of puberty, and from the way she described it, the relationship between mother and daughter was not exactly easy at the moment.

None of that bothered me particularly.

People around fifty rarely come without baggage. Children, former marriages, complicated families, careers, strange habits, old injuries, mortgages, or a dog that cannot be left alone for more than three hours. Anyone looking for a person without a history is probably searching in the wrong age bracket.

Things became more interesting after that.

Throwing Snowballs at the World

When I was living in Kenya, I read Ivo Andrić’s Bosnian Chronicle, and one of its characters stayed with me.

Amédée des Fossés is a young Frenchman attached to the consulate in Bosnia, surrounded by people whose habits, assumptions and social rules are not his own. He could easily have responded in the traditional expatriate manner: by remaining French in the most tedious possible sense, constantly measuring everything around him against the way things were done at home.

Instead, he becomes curious.

He listens to how people speak. He picks up expressions. He notices their jokes, their habits, their little verbal rituals. And occasionally he throws their own sayings back at them.

People like him for it.

Not because he has become Bosnian. He has not. He has simply understood something useful about entering another world: you can spend your time standing outside it, or you can begin to play with what you find there.

I recognized him immediately because, without having thought much about it, I had already begun doing something similar in Kenya.

Life became easier once I stopped insisting that people behave according to rules I had brought with me. If someone said something strange, I learned how to answer. If there was a local expression, I remembered it. If people teased me, I teased them back.

There were little linguistic doors everywhere. Most of them were insignificant. A phrase, a joke, an unexpected reply. But each offered the same choice: you could remain outside, or you could walk through.

What interested me about des Fossés was not simply that he adapted well to another culture. It was the attitude underneath it. Years later I would recognize something similar in Montaigne.

Replacing God With Followers

Leo Braudy describes in *The Frenzy of Renown* something much older than Instagram.

People want to be seen.

Alexander the Great did not need followers. He had chroniclers. Roman generals staged triumphs. Kings commissioned statues. Poets hoped their names would still be spoken long after they were dead.

The technology changes.

The need changes remarkably little.

Fame, after all, means something peculiar: other people should know that I exist. Better still, they should know that it matters that I exist.

An audience confirms my importance.

But human applause has one disadvantage.

It fades.

Ten thousand people know who you are. Why not a hundred thousand?

A hundred thousand know you. Why not a million?

There is no obvious point at which enough people have watched.

Then Christianity arrived with a rather elegant solution to the problem.

Perhaps you do not need many followers.

Perhaps you need only one.

God.

A Hierarchy of Seriousness

There are things in life that deserve to be taken seriously.

A child is ill. Someone you love is in danger. A friend dies. A family breaks apart. A decision may genuinely alter the course of another person’s life.

These are not occasions for irony or clever detachment. They are occasions for seriousness.

The strange thing is that we often use the same emotional machinery for almost everything else.

A delayed train. A bureaucratic letter. A rude cashier. A failed plan. A motorcycle that may or may not be worth buying. A conversation that landed slightly differently than we hoped.

Somehow the machinery starts up anyway.

We analyze, anticipate, rehearse, interpret. We assign consequences. We construct possible futures. A minor inconvenience acquires weight, then meaning, then sometimes an entire philosophy.

Perhaps one reason modern life feels heavier than it needs to is that we have lost the hierarchy.

Talk to Strangers!

This may sound like a rather modest challenge.

I decided to start talking to strangers.

Not for dating.

Not for networking.

Not because I need anything from them.

Just to see whether I can start a small conversation with almost anyone.

In Switzerland, this is more interesting than it sounds.

What Do I Know When the Machine Knows for Me?

Montaigne asked one of philosophy’s smallest and most durable questions:

Que sais-je?

What do I know?

In the age of artificial intelligence, that question has become newly urgent.

AI can now produce an answer to almost anything in seconds. It can defend a position, attack it, summarize the debate, generate counterarguments, cite sources, and sound remarkably certain while doing so.

That creates an obvious danger.

If I already believe immigration is disastrous, I can ask an AI to explain why.

It will.

If I believe immigration is essential to Europe’s future, I can ask it to explain that instead.

It will do that too.

The machine has not necessarily discovered the truth.

It may simply have understood what kind of argument I wanted.

Confirmation bias is ancient. Human beings have always searched for evidence that supports what they already believe.

What AI changes is the cost.

The Chätsy Effect

Mark Twain once wrote:

“All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.”

That was in 1887.

Twain had one decisive advantage.

He had never met Roman Chätsy.

Roman is walking down Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich. Headphones in. Good mood. A Swiss television presenter sticks a microphone in front of him.

What are you listening to?

A podcast.

About what?

AI. Private credit. Markets.

Everything that makes markets go around, right?

Right.

A wonderful word.

It ends a sentence without requiring absolute certainty that the sentence has arrived anywhere.

On Using Tinder for Executive Research

There are sentences that should be kept in museums.

Not because they are especially wise.

Because they show the exact moment language leaves reality and hides in a Swiss mountain bunker.

A former chief executive of one of Switzerland’s largest banks is back in court again. The accusations are pretty serious: hidden business interests, questionable deals, private expenses paid by the company, expensive travel, nightclubs, strip clubs, hotels.

Complicated stuff indeed.

Corporate law is complicated.

Accounting is complicated.

Conflicts of interest are complicated.

Tinder is not complicated.

So the judge asks the banker about a Tinder encounter.

Freedom Has No Reset Button

I had another one of my weak moments and opened a tabloid.

The great sensation of the day was that a mid-forties influencer now had a six-pack.

Fair enough.

What interested me more was the philosophy attached to it:

“Change your energy and your habits. Create a new identity. Just make the decision. Every day, you can choose again who you want to be.”

It sounds uplifting.

Philosophically, it is rather thin.

Because life does not happen in a vacuum.

Of course people can change. They can lose weight, become stronger, learn new skills, leave bad habits behind, change careers, move countries, rebuild relationships, and sometimes alter the course of their lives quite dramatically.

But we do not wake up in the morning as blank pages.

Multiculturalism Needs a “We”

The best vision of a multicultural society is not one in which people erase their differences. It is one in which people with different histories decide to build something together.

One person brings a language, another a religion, another memories of another country. In an open society, nobody should have to surrender their past at the border. Difference can enrich a country. It can widen its imagination, its habits, its food, its music, and even its understanding of what a good life can be.

But diversity alone does not create a community.

A society is more than people occupying the same territory. It begins when people accept some responsibility for one another.

Perhaps this was the weakness of one version of multiculturalism. It confused tolerance with asking very little of people. Come as you are. Live as you wish. The state will provide the rules, and peaceful coexistence will somehow take care of itself.

But a country is not a hotel.

Change the Context

A few days ago, I bought a second-hand wetsuit for almost nothing.

I want to swim in natural lakes more often this autumn. Before then, I needed to know whether the suit fit.

It was the middle of summer. The temperature outside had reached about thirty-four degrees Celsius. I live in an old wooden house that traps heat on days like this.

The plan was simple. Put the wetsuit on. Check the fit. Take it off.

Getting into it was surprisingly easy.

Getting out was not.

The suit gripped my shoulders so tightly that I became stuck. I pulled harder. I twisted my arms. I tried one movement after another.

Nothing worked.

The thick neoprene trapped my body heat. Each minute made the room feel hotter.

My daughter was not with me. Almost everyone in the house and the surrounding neighbourhood had gone away for the holidays. No one nearby could simply come over and help.

If I failed to get out of the suit, I had only one realistic option. I would have to walk out into the street, trapped in a wetsuit, and ask a complete stranger to pull me free.

For the first time, I thought: This is becoming a problem.

Moral Theatre

There are professions in which you are asked what you can do.

And there are professions in which you are asked who you are.

Social work belongs unmistakably to the second category.

Anyone applying for a position as a social worker will sooner or later be asked:

“Why did you become a social worker?”

The question sounds harmless. Yet it often asks for more than professional motivation. The applicant is not merely expected to explain a career choice, but to account for his moral origins.

An engineer is rarely asked why engineering became his calling. An accountant does not need to reveal her life story to justify working with numbers. A pilot can say, “I simply love flying,” without anyone doubting his ability to land an aircraft safely.

In social work, a different logic seems to apply.

It is often not enough to say:

“I work well with people. I am good at this profession. And it allows me to earn a living.”

That sounds too sober. Too professional.

What seems to be missing is a moral narrative.

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I’m tinkering with a new project. Take a look at dots.report.

The Sleepwalkers

Today, on a Sunday, I only wanted to buy a few yogurts.

Instead, I found myself watching a small experiment in human nature.

A few weeks ago, the first 24-hour Migros supermarket in Switzerland opened in my village. There are no cashiers, no staff standing around to help. You scan your loyalty card or a QR code to enter, pick up your groceries, pay at the self-checkout, and leave. It is a system so simple that it could be explained to almost anyone in half a minute.

When I arrived, about ten people were standing outside the entrance.

They were not talking much. They were simply waiting.

Some held their phones against the scanner. Others tried their loyalty cards from different angles. They looked at the machine, looked at each other, then tried again. The bright afternoon sun had apparently made the scanner unreliable.

Yet the door kept opening.

Context Is the Real Product

A few weeks ago, the first 24-hour Migros store in Switzerland opened in my town. It is a small supermarket without staff. You enter by scanning your Cumulus card or an app. Curious to see how it worked, I went there on the opening day.

Instead of finding people shopping, I found a crowd standing outside the entrance. Nobody could get in.

The reason was almost comical. The scanner had been installed in such a way that the morning sun shone directly onto it, making it almost impossible to read the cards. Apparently the system had been tested extensively—except under the rather ordinary condition that the sun shines during the day.

I later wrote a short comment about the incident. Not only because of the faulty scanner, but because something else struck me. Why build an elaborate access control system if anyone can simply walk in behind somebody who is leaving? On paper, the system looked sophisticated. In reality it could be bypassed with almost no effort.

A local newspaper later mentioned the incident as nothing more than a technical problem during the opening, and I assumed that was the end of the story.

The Courage to Intervene

One of the first things I learned as a social worker was that techniques are overrated. Not because they are useless. Every profession needs methods, concepts and frameworks. They help us organise experience and give younger professionals something to build upon instead of forcing every generation to begin from scratch. But after sitting with hundreds of people over the years, another realisation slowly emerged. The same technique can produce completely different results depending on who uses it.

Some practitioners know every model by heart. They can explain every theory, every intervention and every assessment tool with impressive precision. Yet when they sit down with a client, very little happens. The conversation feels mechanical. Every question is technically correct, yet the person sitting opposite never really enters the room. Then someone else comes along. Perhaps they know less theory. Perhaps they could not even explain exactly what they are doing. But within minutes something changes. The client relaxes. The conversation becomes easier. Trust begins to emerge almost before either of them notices it. Whatever that difference is, it cannot be found in the manual alone.

Over time I realised that we spend countless hours learning techniques but surprisingly little time asking a much more uncomfortable question: who is the person using them?

The Pilgrimage

I have been listening to a lecture series by the historian Teofilo Ruiz. His own life is remarkable. As a young man in Cuba, he joined the revolution against Batista. When he became disillusioned with the Castro regime, he opposed it, was imprisoned, and eventually left his country to begin again in the United States. He worked ordinary jobs, studied at night, and eventually became one of America's foremost historians of the Middle Ages.

Perhaps that is why I enjoy listening to him so much. He does not speak like someone who merely studies history. He speaks like someone who has travelled through it.

In one lecture he made a passing remark that has refused to leave me. He spoke about pilgrimage, not simply as the medieval journey to Santiago or Jerusalem, but as a way of understanding life itself. It was almost an aside, the sort of comment that could easily disappear into the next sentence. Yet it lingered. I found myself thinking about it long after the lecture had ended.

It made me wonder whether a pilgrimage has ever really been about the destination. We tend to imagine it as movement through space: roads, mountains, shrines and sacred cities. But perhaps the real destination has always been the traveller. Perhaps the road matters because of what it slowly changes in the person walking it.

Oversteering

Yesterday, while I was on holiday in Istria, Croatia, a man suddenly collapsed in the restaurant where we were having dinner.

He lost consciousness twice. During the second collapse he was completely unconscious. Within seconds, people around him began to panic. His partner immediately reached for a glass of water. She was convinced that the heat was to blame and that he simply had not been drinking enough. In her mind, the explanation was already settled. He was dehydrated, and the obvious solution was to make him drink.

I stopped her.

An unconscious person cannot safely swallow. Trying to force water into someone in that state can cause them to choke and block their airway. In trying to solve what she believed was the problem, she was on the verge of creating a far more dangerous one.

The incident stayed with me for the rest of the evening.

Switzerland Should Not Exist

Years ago, while studying in Zurich, I wrote a paper about William Tell.

At the time, I argued that Tell was one of the key figures holding Switzerland together. Here was a country divided by language, religion, culture, and geography, yet somehow united by a shared story. Tell, I wrote, provided a common symbol around which Swiss identity could form.

Looking back, I am no longer convinced.

In fact, I suspect I had the relationship backwards.

Not because myths are unimportant. Nations need stories. Shared narratives matter. They help people imagine themselves as part of a larger whole.

But I had mistaken the story for the foundation.

The older I get, the more I suspect that William Tell explains far less about Switzerland than most Swiss people would like to believe.

The Question Nobody Wants to Ask

At some point, I realized that I am often preoccupied with a different question than most people.

Not because I am particularly philosophical.

But because I am a social worker who takes his profession seriously.

When someone sits across from me and says, “My life isn't working.”

I can immediately reach for interventions. Program A. Program B. Coaching. Therapy. Occupational support. Integration measures. Conditions and requirements.

There is no shortage of those.

Our society has no shortage of programs, concepts, and interventions.

But before I do anything, a much more fundamental question presents itself:

What is actually going on here?

The Goal Is Not Obedience

One of the first disappointments of childhood is discovering that your parents do not know nearly as much as you once believed. For a time, parents appear almost omniscient. They know where everything is, how things work, and what to do when problems arise. To a young child, they seem remarkably certain about the world.

Eventually, however, the illusion begins to crack. Children notice that adults disagree with one another. They discover that their parents make mistakes. They realize that many decisions are made without certainty and that much of adulthood consists of navigating situations for which there are no obvious answers. What looked like wisdom often turns out to be a mixture of experience, judgment, guesswork, and luck.

At that point, parents face a choice. Some attempt to preserve the illusion. They conceal uncertainty, present judgments as facts, and maintain an appearance of confidence even when they are unsure themselves. I have generally chosen a different approach.

This is not because I believe children should be burdened with adult concerns. Quite the opposite. Children should not become therapists for their parents, nor should they be asked to carry emotional burdens that belong to adults. There is, however, an important distinction between sharing one's burdens and sharing one's reasoning.

What I try to make visible to my daughter is not every detail of my inner life but the process by which I arrive at conclusions.

The Dreamer

There is a bakery near where I live. The pastries are good, the coffee is good, and the service is efficient. Yet if I am honest, none of those things is the main reason I go there.

The real reason is a woman from the Dominican Republic who works behind the counter.

I have known her for years, though not in any meaningful sense. Ours is the sort of acquaintance that develops naturally between people who occupy the same corner of everyday life. The baker. The bus driver. The person at the post office. Familiar faces who become part of the landscape of one's existence without ever becoming close friends.

What makes her remarkable is not anything she says or does in particular. It is her mood.

She is always in a good mood.

And I do not mean the professional cheerfulness that some people adopt as part of their job. I mean something far more genuine and far more puzzling. She looks as though she is having one of the best days of her life. Every day.

In a country like Switzerlandd where even spontaneity feels scheduled, her unapologetic happiness is impossible to ignore.

The Bible Shelf

The other day I visited Aligro, a Swiss cash-and-carry supermarket.

If you have never been to one, imagine a place where everything is sold in quantities suggesting that you are either running a restaurant or preparing for the collapse of civilization.

Ten liters of ketchup.

Twenty kilograms of flour.

Coffee measured in units normally associated with industrial production.

I like these places. There is something refreshingly honest about them.

Nobody is pretending that you only need three paper napkins.

Then I noticed something unexpected.

A shelf of Bibles.

Beyond Authenticity

Authenticity is one of the great ideals of our time.

We are told to find ourselves.

To follow our inner voice.

To discover who we really are.

Every age has its guiding promise. The Middle Ages promised salvation. The nineteenth century promised progress. Our age seems to promise authenticity.

The assumption is simple enough. Somewhere beneath expectations, obligations, social roles, and conventions lies a true self waiting to be discovered. The task of life is to uncover that self and express it.

I spent a considerable part of my life trying to do exactly that.

Today, I am no longer sure the effort was worth as much as I once believed.

Friendly Faces

When I was a child, it was usually obvious who the authority figures were.

The teacher was the authority.

The police officer was the authority.

The doctor was the authority.

The government official was the authority.

You might have liked it or disliked it, but at least you knew where you stood.

Today something has changed.

Not the power.

The language.

Build Systems That Can Correct Themselves

Many people spend their lives looking for the answer.

The right philosophy.

The right diet.

The right career.

The right relationship.

The right political ideology.

The right productivity method.

The right supplement.

The assumption behind all these searches is simple: if we can just find the correct answer, life will finally fall into place.

The problem is that life keeps changing.

The Difference Between "God Believed" and Faith

One of the most provocative statements Werner Erhard reportedly made during est was:

"God believed is a lie."

At first glance, it sounds like an attack on religion.

I no longer think it is.

In fact, I suspect it points toward a distinction that many religious traditions have understood for centuries.

The distinction between believing in something and living it.

A person can believe in God.

A person can attend church every Sunday.

A person can quote scripture from memory.

A person can discuss theology for hours.

And yet none of it may have much effect on how they treat their spouse, their children, their neighbours, or the stranger standing in front of them.

The Apocalypse Will Not Be Trending

The apocalypse will not be trending.

It will not arrive with sirens.

It will not interrupt your programming.

It will not appear as breaking news.

There will be no dramatic music.

No countdown clock.

No final warning.

The apocalypse will not crash the system.

The apocalypse will be the system.

Reducing the Gap Between Map and Territory

One of the most important tasks in life is reducing the gap between our map and the territory.

The territory is reality.

The map is our understanding of reality.

The problem is not merely that our map is incomplete. The deeper problem is that we often forget it is a map at all.

We assume that what we see is what is there.

More importantly, we assume that the way we see is the only possible way of seeing.

Most conflicts begin at precisely this point.

Phenomenology starts with a simple but radical observation:

Perhaps my map is not the territory.

The Unexpected Lesson of Marte Meo

Many years ago, when my daughter was still very young, I came across the Dutch approach known as Marte Meo.

The name means "by one's own strength," and the method is often used with children and families. One of its central ideas is surprisingly simple.

Instead of merely doing things, you narrate what you are doing.

You make the invisible visible.

You tell the child what is happening.

You explain what you are about to do.

You describe what you see.

You provide a running commentary that helps the child understand the situation and your intentions.

At first glance, this may seem unnecessary.

The Olive Oil Problem

Years ago, I met a man who was convinced that drinking large amounts of olive oil was good for his joints.

Not olive leaf extract.

Not a specialized supplement.

Olive oil.

The kind most people pour over a salad.

At first, I assumed I had misunderstood him. Surely he meant some supplement derived from olive oil.

No.

He meant olive oil.

What made the conversation interesting was that he was not an obvious fool. He was fit, disciplined, and regularly competed in triathlons. He looked healthy and energetic.

And he was absolutely certain he knew what he was talking about.

After a while, I stopped arguing.

The Myth of Authenticity

For a long time, I misunderstood authenticity.

Like many people, I believed that being authentic meant showing up exactly as I was, regardless of the situation. If I preferred casual clothes, I wore casual clothes. If I disliked formalities, I ignored them. If a room expected a certain kind of behavior, that was the room's problem, not mine.

There was something noble in that idea.

There was also something childish.

When I was younger, I worked for a very wealthy person. Looking back, I was far more casual than the environment demanded. I often looked as if I had wandered into the office by accident. I did not particularly care. Part of me saw this as a point of principle.

Surprisingly, it worked.

The family liked me. Some people even found it refreshing.

The management was less enthusiastic.

The Underrated Art of Boredom

During my years as a social worker, I noticed something curious: many children seemed to have busier schedules than I did.

Music lessons, sports clubs, tutoring, scouts, homework, birthday parties, school events. Each activity made sense on its own. Each was intended to help the child grow. Yet I sometimes had the impression that I was looking at a twelve-year-old with the calendar of a middle manager.

Modern childhood seems haunted by a peculiar fear: the fear of empty space.

As soon as a child has nothing scheduled, adults begin searching for something to fill the gap. A hobby. A course. A camp. An activity. Anything.

Boredom has become a problem to solve.

I am not sure it is.

Playing Yesterday's Game

The Peter Principle is one of those ideas that is so simple and intuitive that people repeat it endlessly. Employees are promoted until they reach a position where they are no longer competent. The excellent engineer becomes a mediocre manager. The gifted teacher becomes an ineffective administrator. The successful salesperson becomes a poor executive.

The theory is appealing because it often appears true.

The problem is that it mistakes a change of game for a loss of competence.

Many people do not become incompetent after promotion. They remain highly capable. What changes is not their intelligence or their work ethic, but the environment in which those qualities must operate. An engineer is promoted because she solves technical problems. Management requires her to solve human problems. A salesperson succeeds by closing deals. Leadership requires him to build systems and develop people. The skills that made them successful have not disappeared. They have simply become less relevant.

The Peter Principle assumes that people rise until they encounter their limitations. What often happens is more subtle. People rise until the environment stops rewarding their strengths.

This distinction matters because success and adaptation are not the same thing.

What They Are

While reading about the early years of the Soviet Union, I came across an observation that stayed with me.

The communists often claimed that the capitalist West hated them.

There was some truth in that. Western governments opposed communist regimes and feared their expansion. They disliked the censorship, the political repression, the secret police, the labor camps, and the revolutionary violence.

In other words, much of the opposition was directed at what communist governments did.

The communists often saw things differently.

For many of them, the problem was not simply what capitalists did.

The problem was that they were capitalists.

The problem was not merely what landlords did.

The problem was that they were landlords.

The problem was not merely what the bourgeoisie did.

The problem was that they were bourgeois.

This may sound like a subtle distinction.

It is not.

A Thousand Small Choices

A wasted life does not happen in a day.

It does not arrive with sirens.

Not with a thunderclap.

Not with a dramatic mistake.

It arrives quietly.

In a thousand small choices.

Tomorrow.

Next week.

Someday.

Just this once.

Not today.

Practical Phenomenology

When most people hear the word "phenomenology," their eyes begin to glaze over.

It sounds like something that belongs in a philosophy department somewhere between German idealism and an overdue dissertation.

Which is unfortunate.

Because stripped of its technical language, phenomenology may be one of the most practical tools available for everyday life.

Phenomenology begins with a surprisingly simple idea:

Before we explain something, let's look at it.

That is all.

The Strange Case of est

During the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of people attended a controversial personal development program called est, short for Erhard Seminars Training. Created by Werner Erhard, the program placed participants in highly structured weekend seminars that combined confrontation, self-observation, group exercises, and relentless inquiry into the ways people created the realities they experienced.

Critics regarded it as manipulative. Supporters described it as life-changing. Half a century later, people are still arguing about what it actually was.

Part of the reason for this confusion is that est resembles several familiar traditions without fully belonging to any of them.

When I first encountered est, I naturally tried to place it within categories I already understood. It seemed to share certain features with phenomenology, mindfulness, and Zen. Participants were encouraged to observe their thoughts, examine their emotions, and become aware of the stories through which they interpreted their lives. Anyone familiar with meditation immediately recognizes the terrain.

Yet the deeper I looked, the less convincing these comparisons became.

The Difference Between Phenomenology, Mindfulness, and Zen

Spend enough time around philosophy, meditation, or personal development circles and you will eventually hear the same advice:

Pay attention.

Observe your thoughts.

Notice what is happening.

Become aware.

At first glance, phenomenology, mindfulness, and Zen appear to be pointing in the same direction.

In reality, they are pursuing three very different projects.

They begin with the same invitation.

Look.

But they do not arrive at the same destination.

The Hidden Curriculum of Bad Days

My twelve-year-old daughter had the day off school.

The teachers had a conference, which meant that while adults sat in a room discussing education, the children received a rare day of freedom.

What I did not realize at the time was that both of us were about to receive an education.

So we decided to drive to Germany.

My daughter wanted to go to Konstanz. Normally, I am not a great fan of Konstanz. It has become something of a shopping destination for Swiss people. Still, she wanted to go, so off we went.

The first sign that the day would not go according to plan appeared shortly after we arrived.

The shopping center was closed.

At first I noticed only one closed bakery.

Being a social worker who spends perhaps a little too much time thinking about economic decline and the peculiar direction Europe sometimes seems to be heading, I immediately developed a theory.

"Another bankruptcy," I announced confidently.

One Large Important Button

I recently stumbled across a product called the Keychron Q0 Mini 8K Action Key.

At first, I genuinely had no idea what I was looking at.

It appeared to be exactly what it looked like: a single gigantic keyboard key. One enormous mechanical button machined from aluminum, glowing softly like the launch control system of a private nuclear submarine.

So naturally I had to investigate.

The deeper I looked into it, the more it stopped feeling like a gadget and started feeling like a cultural artifact.

The idea behind it is almost absurdly simple. Modern computers have become so layered, abstract, and overloaded with invisible processes that somebody finally decided human beings need one giant programmable button they can physically slam with satisfaction.

One button. One action. One visible consequence.

You can mute your microphone. Launch software. Trigger macros. Shut things down. Activate entire chains of commands. The details hardly matter.

What matters is the feeling.

SLAM.

My Next-Door Neighbor

My next-door neighbors are a large Swiss family.

They have lived next to me for more than ten years.

We greet each other when we meet. Beyond that, our lives mostly run in parallel.

Except for one member of the family.

His name is Ernst.

I call him Ernesto.

I have no idea why. He is about as Swiss-looking as a person can be, but somehow "Ernesto" stuck and he seems amused by it.

He is over ninety years old.

I consider him a friend.

This is slightly surprising because, on paper, we have very little in common.

Ernst spends much of his day reading the Bible.

I am not much of a Christian.

There Is No Donald Trump

People still talk about Donald Trump as though he were a person standing inside politics.

That already misses what happened.

Donald Trump still exists, of course. There is a man somewhere carrying that name. But the symbolic organism called Trump has become vastly larger than the human being underneath it.

Ask ten people who Trump is and you receive ten mutually incompatible realities.

To some, he is the father who finally punches back against managerial elites.

To others, he is the collapse of democracy in human form.

To others, a billionaire outlaw, a troll, a chaos magician, a living meme, an American Napoleon, a reality-TV superorganism feeding on outrage.

At some point the symbolic overload became so extreme that the original human being effectively disappeared beneath it.

The symbolic Trump became more historically significant than the biological Trump.

The Importance of the First Assumption

Paul Watzlawick became famous for his work on communication, misunderstanding, and the realities people create through language. Less well known is how much of his intellectual toolkit came from Gregory Bateson, the anthropologist and systems thinker whose influence runs quietly beneath much of modern psychology.

Bateson spent much of his life asking a deceptively simple question:

How do human beings come to believe what they believe?

Most people assume the process is straightforward.

We observe reality.

We think about it.

We reach conclusions.

Bateson suspected the process was stranger than that.

Recently, I watched a small version of it unfold in real time.

My daughter came home upset.

Several girls from her friend group had gone to the swimming pool.

Without her.

At first, this was merely a fact.

The girls had gone swimming.

She had not.

Nothing more.

Then came the first assumption.

"They didn't invite me."

What happened next was fascinating.

The Quarter Millennium

I rarely read newspapers the way I used to.

Most days I skim headlines, glance at the first paragraph, and move on.

That may sound irresponsible, but modern news is often structured in a way that makes deep reading almost unnecessary. The headline tells you the story. The first paragraph tells you the angle. Everything afterward is usually detail.

The other day, while scrolling through the news, I came across a headline about the upcoming 250th anniversary celebration of the United States.

I do not know all the details behind the story. Perhaps there is more context. Perhaps there are performers I did not see mentioned. But the article appeared in a serious newspaper, so I assume the basic facts were correct.

What caught my attention was the lineup.

Vanilla Ice.

Parts of Milli Vanilli.

An Anthropological Visit to a Bakery

There are two bakeries near where I live.

The first one is deeply, profoundly Swiss.

Not the products. The products are perfectly fine. Bread is bread. Gipfeli are Gipfeli. No, what is truly Swiss is the atmosphere.

You can walk into this bakery ninety-nine times and still feel vaguely like an administrative irregularity.

The interaction is always correct. Polite. Efficient. Emotionally refrigerated.

But there remains an invisible question floating in the air: “Why exactly are you here?”

Perhaps after the hundredth visit, if all social protocols have been properly respected and no excessive spontaneity has occurred, you slowly rise to the social category of “recognized bread purchaser.”

Social integration remains a thirty-year project.

Understanding Is the Booby Prize

One of the most famous lines to come out of est was this:

"Understanding is the booby prize."

The first time I heard it, I disliked it.

As someone with a master's degree in philosophy, understanding seemed to be precisely the point. Universities are built around understanding. Books are written to increase understanding. Entire careers are devoted to understanding.

Yet the older I get, and the longer I work as a social worker, the more I suspect Erhard was pointing at something important.

Not because understanding is worthless.

Because understanding is often where people stop.

The Swedish Backpack

This morning I had an argument with my daughter over a backpack.

No family crisis.

Just one of those ordinary domestic conflicts that seem almost ridiculous from the outside and strangely important from the inside.

My daughter was preparing for a school hiking trip. We were already under time pressure. I had packed everything before she woke up in what I considered the most practical way possible.

The backpack in question was one her mother had bought for her in Sweden. One of those Fjällräven-style Scandinavian backpacks. Not exactly the classic rigid school version, but a more modern variation of the original design. Similar shape, slightly more casual and versatile.

The important thing for me was this: it was already her everyday backpack.

She used it every day for school. She knew exactly where everything was.

The emergency phone. The hay fever medication. The tissue paper. The plaster. All the small practical things children suddenly need when adults are not immediately beside them.

Of course there were teachers on the hiking trip. It was not about survival in the wilderness.

It was about familiarity.