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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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.

On Using Tinder for Executive Research