Freedom Without a Price Tag

During Covid, I learned something about freedom. The strange thing is that I barely noticed it at the time.

I was unvaccinated, and within a remarkably short period my life became smaller. I could no longer go to certain restaurants, hotels were out too, and travel became difficult or impossible. The restaurants did not bother me much. Hotels mattered even less. But not being able to travel touched something different.

It was less the journey itself than the possibility of it. Crossing a border. Getting into the car and driving somewhere else. Not having to wonder whether I would be allowed to book a hotel room in another country. Things I had barely thought about before suddenly became conditions.

Perhaps a large part of our freedom consists of things we do not even recognize as freedom while they are still available to us.

What surprises me almost more today than the restrictions themselves is how quickly I got used to them.

Life became smaller, so I arranged myself within the smaller life.

Swiss Problems

Swiss Problems: Switzerland Dispatches Police After Child Loses Booger

While wars continue, governments quarrel and international institutions struggle with the usual catalogue of human misery, Switzerland faced a problem of its own this week.

It began with a child's Nasenböögg.

This is a real story.

A woman was driving with her two young daughters from Konolfingen towards Interlaken. Near Wimmis, one of the children announced that she had a Nasenböögg and asked her mother to get rid of it.

For readers outside Switzerland, Nasenböögg is a Swiss German term for what English speakers would generally call a booger.

There was no tissue available.

The mother had recently cleaned the car and apparently did not want the Nasenböögg deposited somewhere inside it. She therefore tried to flick it out of the window.

Unfortunately, it stuck to her hand.

Real Life

Not long ago I came across an Instagram profile in which someone wrote that they were interested in real life.

I liked the phrase immediately. Perhaps because I flatter myself that I am interested in real life too. But the expression stayed with me, because once we speak of real life, we quietly admit the existence of another kind.

Unreal life, presumably.

And it occurred to me that we now spend a rather large part of our lives there.

Instagram itself would seem a reasonable place to begin. People photograph their food, their holidays, their children, their faces; they choose one image out of twenty, improve it, crop it, remove whatever does not belong in the story, and then wait to see what other people make of this small exhibition.

It is tempting to say that this has little to do with life.

Yet there sits a real person with a real telephone, spending twenty real minutes, perhaps forty, perhaps two hours, from a life that will not be extended by the amount spent on Instagram.

So already the distinction becomes inconvenient.

Take a child who wakes up, turns on a computer and plays for twelve or fourteen hours before going to bed again. My instinct is the conventional one. I want to say: Go outside. Meet someone. Do something. Live.

But he has been living.

Ukraine: Where Are the Children of the Rich?

I do not always have myself entirely under control. Occasionally I find myself on a news website, or on something that looks sufficiently like a news website to make the distinction academic. This happened to me the other day.

I saw a headline. I did not even read the article.

Perhaps this is becoming my McLuhan method of journalism: why bother with the content when the medium has already done most of the work?

The headline was an interview question addressed to Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv:

“Where are the children of the rich politicians fighting, Mr Klitschko?”

I have no particular desire to defend Klitschko. Nor is this an essay about whether one should admire Zelenskyy, support the Ukrainian government, sympathise with Russia, send more weapons, send fewer weapons, negotiate tomorrow morning, or fight until Thursday afternoon. There are already enough people who can explain the war in Ukraine to you with complete confidence.

I am not one of them.

When the Solution Invents the Problem

We like to think that institutions exist to solve problems, and very often they do. Yet institutions also have another, less obvious tendency: they begin to define problems in forms that can be handled with the tools already available to them.

This is not necessarily cynical, and in most cases it is not even conscious. A school cannot conduct family policy, a hospital cannot create friendships, an employment office cannot generate a regional economy, and an immigration authority cannot bring a war to an end. Every institution has a mandate, and without such limits it could hardly function at all.

The difficulty begins when those limits start to shape not only what an institution can do, but what it is able to see. At that point the intervention no longer simply follows the diagnosis. The intervention itself begins to influence the diagnosis.

Take an unemployed man who goes to an employment office. His CV is revised, his cover letters are improved, he attends courses, practises interviews and perhaps receives coaching intended to improve his confidence or application strategy. There is nothing wrong with any of this. A good application can genuinely make a difference.

But suppose the application is not really the problem. Perhaps the man is fifty-eight years old and spent thirty years in one industry until the company closed. Perhaps employers now demand qualifications that were never required when he entered the profession. Perhaps younger applicants are cheaper, expected to remain longer, or are simply regarded as more flexible. Perhaps there are hardly any suitable jobs left in his region at all.

No amount of coaching can create those jobs.

Meta-Montaigne: The Eye Cannot See Itself

I love Montaigne. I have read the Essays from beginning to end at least twice and keep returning to them, not because he offers a system, but because he offers something closer to a method of living. He can begin with horses, thumbs, smells, drunkenness, or some Roman anecdote and somehow arrive at death, friendship, education, or human nature. Even the word essai contains the method: an attempt, a trial, an exercise. Try something, see what happens, change your mind, try again. Perhaps that is why I have always felt such an affinity with him.

But Montaigne was only human, and this becomes particularly interesting when we look at one of the most famous experiments of his life: his retreat. In 1571, not yet forty, he withdrew from public life to his estate. In his tower he had his books, quotations painted on the beams, and apparently the intention of spending the remaining years of his life in liberty, tranquillity, and contemplation.

It is a beautiful image: Montaigne in his tower. Unfortunately, Montaigne himself seems to have had some difficulty living up to it.

My Life Is My Hobby

People occasionally ask me what my hobbies are. It comes up in those conversations where two people are trying to establish fairly quickly what sort of person they are dealing with.

I have never been very good at answering.

Not because I have none. Quite the opposite. I swim, I read, I write, I travel, I have become interested in philosophy, history, films, political events, people I meet by accident, and subjects of which, three days earlier, I knew absolutely nothing. Some of these interests stay with me for years, others disappear after a week, and occasionally I try something only to discover that I do not like it at all.

That seems useful too.

What I have never felt much need to do is turn these things into identities. I swim, but I do not particularly think of myself as a swimmer. I ride a motorcycle, but I do not feel obliged to become a motorcyclist. I read philosophy and literature more than is probably reasonable, but even here I hesitate to call reading my hobby.

Perhaps the difficulty lies partly in the word itself. A hobby sounds like a fenced-off section of life. There is work, there is family, there are obligations, and then, somewhere to the side, there is a little recreational compartment where one keeps cycling, photography, hiking, cooking, tennis, or reading.

I have never quite experienced life that way.

My life itself seems to be the hobby.

Not Next Time

After Covid, a lot of people eventually said something you hear surprisingly often once something is over: Next time, we won’t do it like that again. We won’t let ourselves get swept up so quickly. Not by fear, not by outrage, not by enthusiasm. We’ll look first. We’ll think for ourselves. We won’t simply join in because everyone else is doing it.

It sounds reasonable. The problem is that next time never looks like last time.

Covid does not come back with the same name, the same images, and the same political arguments. Next time might be a football World Cup. An election. A scandal. Or something completely harmless. A solar eclipse, for example.

I watched this recently with some curiosity. Suddenly everyone was busy with it. People went outside, took pictures of the sky, sent each other messages and asked: “Can you see it too?” My daughter was bombarded with WhatsApp messages. Classmates posted photos. The same excitement seemed to be everywhere.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with a solar eclipse.

Growth Through Friction

Mandeville had an uncomfortable idea: a society does not live economically only from its virtues, but also from its imperfections. Vanity keeps tailors in business. Illness keeps doctors busy. Conflict gives work to lawyers. What appears morally or socially as a flaw can generate economic activity.

Perhaps this idea can be applied to modern service economies.

A society can grow not only because it produces more. It can also grow because it has more problems to deal with.

At first, there is nothing remarkable about this. After a hailstorm, roofs need to be repaired. More crime creates additional work for the police, private security and the courts. Cyberattacks increase the demand for IT security. Illness creates demand for medical services. In all these cases, economic activity is generated.

But this does not mean that society has become wealthier because of the underlying damage.

This is where the distinction between growth and prosperity becomes important.

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.

Freedom Without a Price Tag

Swiss Problems

Real Life