We are told that wealth is a measure of contribution. The richer a person becomes, the more they must have given to society. This is one of the founding myths of capitalism. It is repeated so often that many people accept it without thinking. Schoolchildren are taught that great fortunes are the reward for hard work, intelligence, innovation, and risk. Newspapers celebrate billionaires as visionaries. Politicians praise entrepreneurs as wealth creators. Business commentators speak of fortunes as though they emerged from the mind of a single genius rather than from the labour of millions.

With discussion around Elon Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire, we are witnessing this mythology in its purest form. A trillion dollars is such a vast sum that it barely registers as a real quantity. Most people cannot imagine a million dollars. A billion is one thousand times larger. A trillion is one thousand billions. The figure slips beyond ordinary understanding. That is precisely why it deserves examination.

A trillionaire does not represent the triumph of human potential. It represents a historic failure of human society. The existence of a trillionaire demonstrates that the wealth produced by countless workers has been concentrated into the hands of one individual on a scale without precedent. It reveals a world where economic power has become so centralised that a single person can command resources greater than those available to many nations. It exposes the absurdity of a system that struggles to house, feed, educate, and care for billions while allowing one man to accumulate wealth beyond any conceivable personal use. The question is not whether Elon Musk deserves a trillion dollars. The question is how any human being can possess such wealth while millions remain trapped in poverty and insecurity.

Supporters of Musk often present him as a self-made man. This narrative collapses under scrutiny. Like every capitalist, Musk’s fortune depends on the labour of others. Cars are not produced by CEOs. Rockets are not assembled by shareholders. Satellites are not launched by investors. Every product associated with Musk emerges from the collective work of engineers, technicians, cleaners, warehouse workers, coders, miners, drivers, administrators, and countless others spread across global supply chains. The workers create the value. Capitalism ensures that a portion of that value is appropriated by those who own. This is the foundation of the system. It is not a flaw. It is its organising principle.

Workers sell their labour because they must survive. Owners purchase labour because it generates profit. The difference between what workers are paid and the value they produce becomes the source of accumulated wealth. The billionaire does not become rich despite workers. The billionaire becomes rich because workers exist. A trillionaire therefore represents an immense transfer of wealth from labour to capital. Every increase in personal fortune reflects social wealth flowing upward. Every surge in stock valuation signals the expansion of ownership claims over the productive efforts of others.

When people speak about Musk’s wealth, they often point out that much of it exists in shares rather than cash. This observation is supposed to reassure us. It misses the point entirely. Ownership itself is power. A billionaire does not need a vault filled with banknotes. Ownership grants command over resources, workplaces, technologies, land, infrastructure, and labour. A share certificate is not merely a financial instrument. It is a legal claim on the wealth produced by others.

The distinction between cash and shares matters little to those whose lives are shaped by the decisions of corporations. Workers can lose jobs because of shareholder demands. Communities can be transformed by investment decisions. Governments can be pressured by wealthy investors threatening capital flight. The power is real regardless of the form it takes.

Musk’s rise also reveals how modern capitalism has transformed celebrity into an economic force. Earlier generations of industrialists often remained distant figures. Today’s billionaires cultivate public identities. They present themselves as rebels, outsiders, innovators, or visionaries. Social media has allowed wealthy individuals to bypass traditional gatekeepers and communicate directly with millions. This creates a dangerous illusion. People begin to identify with billionaires rather than with their fellow workers. Workers earning ordinary wages defend the interests of men whose fortunes exceed the economic output of entire countries. People struggling with rent celebrate stock market gains that bring them no benefit. Citizens facing stagnant wages cheer the accumulation of wealth that deepens social inequality. The billionaire becomes a character in a story rather than a participant in a class relationship.

This confusion is politically useful. A population that admires the rich is less likely to question the structures that make extreme wealth possible. The focus shifts from exploitation to personality. Critics are invited to debate whether Musk is clever, eccentric, rude, entertaining, innovative, or controversial. The economic system itself escapes scrutiny. Yet no amount of personality can explain a trillion-dollar fortune.

The reality is that capitalism naturally concentrates wealth. Competition eliminates weaker firms. Successful companies absorb rivals. Markets become dominated by fewer players. Capital accumulates. Wealth generates more wealth. Ownership expands. Economic power becomes increasingly centralised. This tendency has been observed for centuries. It is visible everywhere. Small businesses disappear while giant corporations expand across continents. Local economies become subordinate to multinational firms. Financial institutions grow larger and more interconnected. The rich become richer because wealth itself creates advantages unavailable to everyone else.The emergence of a trillionaire is therefore not an accident. It is a logical outcome of capitalist development.

Defenders of the system often argue that extreme wealth benefits everyone because successful entrepreneurs drive innovation. Without billionaires, we are told, society would stagnate. This argument rests on a profound misunderstanding of how innovation actually occurs. Scientific breakthroughs emerge from collective effort. Research depends on generations of accumulated knowledge. Universities train scientists. Public institutions fund basic research. Workers develop technologies. Engineers solve practical problems. Ideas circulate through society. The myth of the lone genius obscures this reality.

Even the technologies associated with Musk rely heavily on public investment and collective knowledge. The internet, satellite systems, computing technologies, battery research, aerospace engineering, and countless other innovations emerged through decades of social effort. No individual invented them alone. The billionaire arrives at the end of the process and claims ownership.

Capitalism rewards ownership far more generously than contribution. A nurse contributes more to society than a hedge fund manager. A sanitation worker contributes more to public health than a venture capitalist. A teacher contributes more to human development than a speculator. Yet wealth flows overwhelmingly toward ownership rather than social usefulness. This contradiction lies at the heart of the system. The trillionaire embodies it in its most extreme form.

There is also a deeper moral question. What kind of society permits such concentrations of wealth while basic needs remain unmet? Across the world, people struggle to obtain housing, healthcare, education, clean water, and food security. Millions live under constant economic pressure. Entire regions face ecological devastation. Public infrastructure deteriorates. Social services are cut in the name of fiscal responsibility. Governments routinely claim there is insufficient money to address these problems. Yet somehow enough wealth exists for individuals to accumulate fortunes measured in hundreds of billions.

The issue is not scarcity. The issue is distribution. Humanity already possesses the productive capacity to ensure a decent standard of living for everyone. The obstacle is not technological. It is political and economic. Resources are allocated according to profit rather than need. Production serves markets rather than communities. Human welfare remains subordinate to private accumulation. The existence of a trillionaire makes this contradiction impossible to ignore.

Anarchists have long argued that concentrated wealth and concentrated power are inseparable. Economic domination inevitably produces political domination. Those who control resources acquire influence over governments, media institutions, public discourse, and social priorities. This influence does not require conspiracy. A billionaire can shape society simply through ordinary decisions. Investment choices affect employment. Ownership influences information flows. Political donations affect policy. Corporate lobbying shapes legislation. Media platforms alter public discussion. Power follows property. This is why anarchists reject the distinction often made between economic and political authority. A boss who controls access to wages possesses power. A landlord who controls access to housing possesses power. A billionaire who controls vast resources possesses power. The fact that such authority emerges through markets rather than elections does not make it less significant. Freedom becomes hollow when survival depends upon institutions controlled by others. The billionaire class therefore represents more than economic inequality. It represents a form of social domination.

Supporters of Musk frequently point to his ambitions regarding space exploration, artificial intelligence, and technological progress. They argue that history advances because extraordinary individuals pursue extraordinary projects. Yet this argument quietly assumes that humanity requires rulers. It assumes that collective intelligence is incapable of organising complex activity without wealthy patrons. It assumes that workers can build rockets but cannot democratically determine social priorities. It assumes that innovation requires hierarchy. It assumes that progress depends upon concentrated ownership. Anarchists reject these assumptions. People cooperate every day without billionaires directing them. Scientific communities exchange knowledge across borders. Workers coordinate vast production systems. Mutual aid networks emerge during crises. Communities organise themselves whenever institutions fail. Human beings possess extraordinary capacities for cooperation.

A world organised around human need would direct resources toward collective flourishing. Housing would be treated as a necessity rather than an investment vehicle. Healthcare would be available to all. Production would be shaped by ecological realities rather than shareholder demands. Technology would serve communities rather than private fortunes. In such a society, the appearance of a trillionaire would be regarded as evidence of dysfunction rather than achievement.

Future generations may look back upon our era with astonishment. They may struggle to understand how societies tolerated such extremes. They may find it strange that people celebrated individuals whose fortunes exceeded the budgets of nations while children went hungry and families slept in cars. They may wonder why journalists wrote admiring profiles of billionaires instead of questioning the institutions that produced them. Perhaps they will see trillionaires the way we see hereditary aristocrats. For centuries, kings and nobles claimed that their privileges were natural, necessary, and beneficial. Entire societies were organised around these assumptions. Today those claims appear absurd. The billionaire class rests upon similarly fragile foundations. Its power depends upon social acceptance. Its legitimacy depends upon stories. People must believe that extreme wealth reflects merit. They must believe that hierarchy is natural. They must believe that ownership confers moral authority. Once those beliefs begin to crack, the system becomes harder to defend.

Elon Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire is celebrated across financial markets. Investors cheer. Business magazines will undoubtedly produce commemorative covers. Commentators will describe a historic milestone. Workers should see something different. They should see a measure of how much wealth has been extracted from collective labour. They should see a reminder that capitalism rewards ownership more lavishly than work. They should see evidence that economic power has become dangerously concentrated. Most importantly, they should refuse the invitation to admire their oppressors.

The wealthy are not our role models. They are not proof that the system works. They are proof of who the system works for. A trillionaire is not the symbol of a successful society. A trillionaire is the symbol of a society that has allowed wealth, power, and human possibility to be monopolised by a tiny ruling class while the vast majority produce the world and receive only a fraction of what they create. The proper response is neither envy nor admiration. It is opposition.

Remember: Kurt Vonnegut was 47

The Long Apprenticeship

At forty-seven, Kurt Vonnegut published Slaughterhouse-Five. He had been a struggling writer, a car salesman, a PR man at General Electric, and a failed playwright. He had seen war firsthand, lived through firebombs, raised six children (four of them adopted after his sister's death), and produced a shelf of novels that garnered little attention. Then suddenly, almost accidentally, he became one of the most important American voices of the twentieth century. When people recall Vonnegut now, they picture the wry, cigarette-smoking humanist, the man who wrote about time travel and Dresden and the strange species of Tralfamadorians. But in 1969, when Slaughterhouse-Five came out, he was not young, not new, and certainly not destined to succeed. He was forty-seven.

Why does this matter? Because we live in a culture obsessed with precocity. We valorize the twenty-two-year-old founder, the thirty-year-old Nobel laureate, the poet who dies before publishing her second book. To be forty-seven in America often feels like you are past your prime, coasting toward irrelevance. And yet Vonnegut’s story punctures this narrative. It raises the uncomfortable, thrilling question: how much can be done late, when everyone thinks the window has closed?

American culture has always been suspicious of age. Fitzgerald made it clear in This Side of Paradise - the whole point was to capture the fleeting brilliance of youth before it calcified into routine. The Beats chased a similar myth, a reckless vitality that had to burn out quickly. Silicon Valley today has its own catechism: Zuckerberg’s infamous line, “Young people are just smarter.” It’s the same fetish, rebranded.

But history doesn’t quite bear this out. Galileo was in his forties when he published his most radical works. Thomas Paine was forty when Common Sense reshaped political thought. Susan B. Anthony was fifty-two when she cast her first illegal vote. The assumption that genius peaks young has always been a convenient myth. It flatters the ambitious and terrifies the hesitant. It also blinds us to the fact that many of history’s breakthroughs came from people who had been around long enough to see patterns others missed.

Vonnegut is a particularly vivid example because he had already failed. He had written science fiction for pulp magazines, novels like Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan that earned him modest attention but little money. He was not a wunderkind. He was a midlist author, typing away between family obligations and day jobs. By the logic of our culture, he should have given up. Instead, he wrote the book that only someone with his scars, his age, and his accumulated oddities could have produced.

There is dignity in failure, especially prolonged failure. Consider Melville: forgotten after Moby-Dick, reduced to writing insurance reports, rediscovered decades later. Or Emily Dickinson, who failed in the most invisible way: unread in her lifetime, her poems quietly fermenting in a drawer. Vonnegut’s failures were of a different sort - his books did get published, but with disappointing results. He was a writer who could fill a shelf in a used bookstore, gathering dust beside more fashionable authors. But that experience mattered. Slaughterhouse-Five is not a young man’s book. Its humor is laced with bitterness, its form is fractured by time, and its philosophy is resigned rather than triumphant. Only someone who had seen things fall apart (repeatedly) could have written it.

And maybe this is why age can produce greatness. Youth thrives on conviction; age is forced into complexity. Vonnegut could not tell a clean story about Dresden. He knew memory was fractured, that trauma distorted time, that irony was the only language left. His narrative jumps back and forth through decades, between planets and battlefields; because that was the only way to be honest.

Middle age is rarely glamorous. Dante placed himself “midway in our life’s journey” in the dark wood, lost and confused. The Greeks had their crises too - Solon supposedly argued that you could not call a man happy until he died, because only the full arc could reveal whether fortune had spared him. At forty-seven, Vonnegut was in that territory. He had no assurance his career would matter. His books were not chart-toppers. He was supporting a sprawling family on uneven income. He had lived enough to know the absurdities of both war and corporate America. Out of that stew came Slaughterhouse-Five.

This matters; because middle age is often treated as decline, the moment when one’s creativity has been used up. Neuroscience papers are circulated to show how fluid intelligence peaks in your twenties, how mathematicians do their best work before thirty-five. But there is another kind of intelligence: crystallized, layered, associative. The ability to see connections across disciplines, to synthesize long experience into something new. Vonnegut’s novel is precisely that kind of synthesis: war memoir, science fiction, satire, elegy.

Vonnegut’s war had always haunted him. As a young soldier, he was captured in the Battle of the Bulge, held in Dresden, and survived the firebombing by hiding in a slaughterhouse basement. It took him decades to turn this into art.

Some traumas resist immediate rendering.

Primo Levi needed years before If This Is a Man could be written. Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy required the hindsight of the 1990s to reimagine the First World War. Vonnegut’s forty-seven-year-old self could finally write what his twenty-five-year-old self could only (and barely) endure.

Slaughterhouse-Five is not cathartic. It does not end with redemption. The famous refrain - “So it goes” - is less about acceptance or closure, than about repetition, about the endless cycle of death. The book offers no comfort, but it does offer recognition.

That recognition is the work of age.

Life, all this living, all this striving is a long apprenticeship that cannot be compressed. Some writers learn style and voice quickly; others take decades. Henry James distinguished between the “young genius” and the “late bloomer,” but suggested both paths were legitimate.

Vonnegut’s early books were uneven, witty but scattered. He had not yet found the tone that made him distinctive. By the time he reached Slaughterhouse-Five, he had rehearsed irony, satire, science fiction tropes, and autobiographical fragments enough times to finally bring them together. Forty-seven was not late; it was right on time.

Chartres was not built in a decade. The Parthenon was rebuilt multiple times. Sometimes greatness takes patience, not precocity.

Why does our culture cling to the idea that if you haven’t made it by thirty, you won’t? Part of it is economic: industries want to exploit youthful energy at low wages. Part of it is romantic: the myth of the prodigy is more cinematic than the tale of the slow grinder. But part of it may also be anxiety about mortality. To celebrate the late bloomer is to admit that our lives can change radically past middle age, which is destabilizing. If anything can happen at forty-seven, then perhaps we cannot measure ourselves against arbitrary deadlines.

Vonnegut mocked all deadlines. He wrote about time as non-linear, about events existing simultaneously. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim comes “unstuck in time.” That phrase could apply to Vonnegut himself: his career looked like a sequence of failures until it suddenly wasn’t.

We are all unstuck in time.

Our successes and failures do not unfold in neat order.

Sometimes they arrive decades late.

Remember: Kurt Vonnegut was forty-seven when he wrote his masterpiece. And this fact should unsettle us! It should challenge the myth that our best years are always early. It should remind us that the middle of life can be fertile, that failure can ripen into art, that age can distill experience into something no youth could mimic. To be forty-seven is not to be finished. It may, for some, be the very beginning.

Everybody likes fun. And fun, like anything, can be nuanced; not all fun is created equal.

But it wasn’t until June 2001, while bushwhacking through thickets of Alaskan devil’s club—home to hungry grizzly bears—that I learned of the Fun Scale. Fun, it turns out, is quantifiable.

The bushwhacking came about because my friend Peter had invited me to join him on a low-key outing: a boat ride across a gorgeous bay to climb a small, mellow mountain. It sounded like the perfect finish to my trip, as I’d spent the previous month climbing in the Alaska Range. My climbing partner, Scott, and I had had a terrific trip. Though we were often terrified while actually climbing, we loved it later.

I tried to keep up with Peter as branches whacked me in the face.

“You know that there are three types of fun,” Peter said, bushwacking onward.

“Hey, bear!” I responded. We were trying to return to his sailboat—home to a cooler of cold beers.

Peter kept going, and described the Fun Scale. Here it is:

Type I Fun

Type 1 fun is enjoyable while it’s happening. Also known as, simply, fun. Good food, 5.8 hand cracks. Sport climbing, powder skiing, margaritas.

Type II Fun

Type 2 fun is miserable while it’s happening, but fun in retrospect. It usually begins with the best intentions, and then things get carried away. Riding your bicycle across the country. Doing an ultramarathon. Working out till you puke, and, usually, ice and alpine climbing. Also surely familiar to mothers, at least during childbirth and the dreaded teenage years.

I remember that very trip to Alaska, just a week before learning about the Fun Scale, when Scott and I climbed Mt. Huntington. Huntington might be the most beautiful mountain in the Alaska Range, but the final thousand feet was horrifying—steep sugar snow that collapsed beneath our feet as we battled upward, unable to down-climb, and unable to find protection or anchors. On the summit, with the immaculate expanse of the range unfolding in every direction, Scott turned to me and said, in complete seriousness, “I want my mom so bad right now.”

By the time we reached Talkeetna his tune changed: “Ya know, that wasn’t so bad. What should we try next year?”

Type III Fun

Type 3 fun is not fun at all. Not even in retrospect. Afterward, you think, “What in the hell was I doing? If I ever come up with another idea that stupid, somebody slap some sense into me.” Many alpine climbs. Failed relationships that lacked Type I fun. Offwidths. Writing a book.

Into which category a given experience falls, of course, is highly subjective and highly subject to shifts (particularly from III to II) born of the rosy reflections afforded us by the passage of time.

Which is probably a good thing. After all, as alpinists and mothers both know: It doesn’t have to be “fun” to be fun.

Voir aussi The Fun Scale | Kelly Cordes

Décidément, un rien vous habille !

Petit éloge de la nudité

Si j’apprécie le fait de nager ou de faire un sauna tout nu, le naturisme ne m’avait jamais réellement attiré. Sans juger ceux qui le pratiquaient, je considérais que ce n’était tout simplement pas pour moi.

Jusqu’au jour où un couple d’amis est parti vivre à l’étranger. Depuis trente ans, ils passent toutes leurs vacances dans un centre naturiste. Ils nous ont invités à les rejoindre une semaine.

J’ai tout d’abord rechigné. Mes plus bas instincts patriarcaux, dont j’ignorais jusqu’à l’existence, se sont rebellés à l’idée que mon épouse soit nue au milieu d’étrangers. Mais elle a argué que nous n’aurions plus beaucoup d’opportunités de revoir nos amis, que je n’étais pas obligé de l’accompagner, que ce n’était que quelques jours, qu’au pire, cela ferait une expérience intéressante.

J’ai opposé un mâle refus catégorique. C’est ainsi que, quelques mois plus tard, nous avons débarqué en famille avec armes et (trop de) bagages au sein d’un gigantesque complexe naturiste.

La première chose qui m’a rassuré fut de constater que beaucoup de gens étaient bel et bien habillés. Si la nudité est obligatoire à la plage et à la piscine, le reste du camp est entièrement libre.

Force est de constater que, durant les premières heures, mon regard fut irrémédiablement attiré par ces corps nus marchant, faisant du mini-golf, du vélo ou de la pétanque. Mon esprit y voyait quelque chose d’anormal, de choquant. Moi-même, je ne me déshabillais que pour accéder à la plage.

Et puis, bien plus rapidement que tout ce que j’avais pu imaginer, mon sentiment de normalité a basculé. Ces jeunes, ces vieux, ces vieilles, ces hommes, ces femmes, ces enfants, ces ados, ces gros·ses, ces maigres. Tou·te·s sont devenu un brouillard couleur chair bronzée dans lequel je me mouvais sans avoir à faire attention à ma propre apparence, à l’image que je véhiculais.

Une nudité normale, respectueuse et déconnectée

Depuis les zones de campings de tentes Décathlon aux larges chalets devant lesquels sont garées des Tesla flambant neuves, le camp naturiste fédère un panaché de catégories sociales. Pourtant, une fois dégagées de l’incontournable apparat des vêtements, les classes ne se distinguent plus. Une sensation d’égalité se dégage.

Très vite, mon propre corps m’est apparu comme parfaitement normal, banal. Ni le plus gros, ni le plus maigre, ni le plus musclé, ni le plus malingre. J’ai acquis la conviction particulièrement reposante qu’il n’intéressait personne. Ce fait est particulièrement important pour les femmes habituées à être reluquées. Mon épouse m’a confié l’étonnant sentiment de confiance de se sentir nue sur la plage avec un respect naturel des hommes. Car, dans un camp naturiste, un homme indélicat ne va pas s’attarder sur un corps comme il peut le faire en temps normal sur un décolleté ou un string. Les corps nus sont la normalité.

Il faut avouer que cette ambiance respectueuse est rendue possible par l’organisation d’une sécurité impressionnante. De jeunes jobistes patrouillent en permanence. Tout comportement indélicat est immédiatement sanctionné et, en cas de récidive, peut mener à l’exclusion.

La liberté de la nudité n’est pas simplement psychologique. Elle est également matérielle. Mon épouse et moi-même avons découvert que nous avions prévu beaucoup trop de linge pour la semaine. Pas de linge, pas de lessive, pas d’usure, pas de besoin de renouveler une garde-robe. Outre l’égalité, la nudité offre une contre-mesure incroyable au consumérisme.

Nous qui ne supportons pas le tabac, nous avons également rarement été aussi peu dérangés par la cigarette. Si certains fument, ils m’ont semblé moins nombreux que dans les endroits que je fréquente habituellement. Philosophiquement, le refus du tabac et le l’alcool font partie des fondements historiques du naturisme. Il est d’ailleurs interdit de fumer sur l’île naturiste du Levant, dans le Var.

Une règle évidente d’un camp naturiste est l’interdiction de prendre des photos sur lesquelles peuvent apparaitre d’autres membres. Cela semble logique, mais cela a un impact profond : l’immense majorité des vacanciers se déplace sans smartphone. Sans poche, c’est d’ailleurs peu pratique. À quelques rares exceptions près, je n’ai vu personne rivé sur son écran durant toutes la semaine. En croisant des bandes d’adolescents qui se retrouvaient ou se déplaçaient, je fus plus frappé par la disparition totale des smartphones que par l’absence de vêtements.

En les voyant faire du surf ou des concours de poirier, la nudité souriante de ces corps élancés m’est apparue comme une métaphore de la déconnexion.

La contre-sexualisation de la nudité

L’une de mes craintes inconscientes avant de pratiquer le naturisme était certainement l’aspect sexuel. Je ne supporte ni le voyeurisme ni l’exhibitionnisme et j’avais peur de me retrouver au milieu d’une population pratiquant une forme douce des deux.

Je m’étais totalement fourvoyé.

Ce n’est pas la nudité qui sexualise. C’est nous qui sexualisons la nudité en la cachant, en la rendant honteuse.

Nous avons tellement peur que nos enfants soient confrontés à la violence de la pornographie en ligne que nous en oublions que c’est l’une des seules occasions durant laquelle ils seront confrontés à la nudité. Le corps est alors irrémédiablement associé au sexe, à la violence, à l’humiliation.

L’hyper sexualisation de la nudité est poussée à l’extrême par les religions qui cherchent à camoufler le corps des femmes. Mais, d’une manière générale, toutes les religions monothéistes rejettent violemment la nudité. En cachant le corps, on génère artificiellement la honte et la violence. On transforme le corps en marchandise tout en soumettant l’esprit aux dictats religieux.

À l’inverse, l’ostentation si prisée par le consumérisme est également délétère. Sur tout le séjour, une seule personne m’a négativement impactée. Une femme sur la plage qui, bien que nue, portait de lourds bracelets aux poignets et aux chevilles, un collier, des lunettes de soleil de marque, un chapeau compliqué. Marchant avec des sandales aux talons surélevés, elle fumait de longues et très fines cigarettes. Il m’a fallu quelques secondes avant de comprendre pourquoi j’avais été choqué. Contrairement aux milliers d’autres naturistes, cette personne mettait sa nudité en scène. Elle perpétuait, probablement sans en être conscient, le jeu capitaliste de la marchandisation des corps. Le fait qu’elle ait été la seule de tout mon séjour à fumer sur la plage n’est probablement pas anodin.

La maladie de l’anti-nudité

Le souvenir d’un ancien voisin m’est un jour revenu. Il y a quelques années, cet homme, avec qui j’échangeais jusque là de simples « Bonjour », avait commencé à m’injurier en hurlant, en me traitant de malade mental. Il m’avait fallu de longues minutes de palabres pour comprendre qu’il m’avait un jour vu nu dans mon jardin.

Il faut reconnaitre que lorsqu’il faisait nuit noire, persuadé que personne ne pouvait me voir, j’allais parfois me plonger nu dans le bac d’eau qui nous sert de piscine.

Mes explications et excuses n’ont en rien atténué sa colère. Le simple fait que je puisse être nu chez moi m’avait transformé définitivement en monstre abject mentalement dérangé.

Ma brève expérience du naturisme m’a permis de me rendre compte à quel point ce rejet de la nudité est une maladie. Car nous sommes tous nus sous nos vêtements. Nous avons tous un corps. Il n’y a rien de plus naturel que la nudité. Que ce voisin soit entré dans une colère aussi noire pour un événement aussi anodin en dit long sur sa propre haine inconsciente du corps humain.

En rejetant et sexualisant la nudité, nous traumatisons le regard de nos enfants sur leur propre corps, nous générons artificiellement de la violence, de la souffrance, de la honte.

À toutes les personnes qui sont complexées vis-à-vis de leur propre corps, je ne peux que conseiller de passer quelques jours dans un camp naturiste.

Cela demande du courage, c’est réellement étrange. Ce n’est certainement pas pour tout le monde.

Mais c’est un avant-goût d’une liberté que nous avons trop souvent camouflée. C’est un remède contre la marchandisation et la bigoterie qui étouffent nos corps et nos esprits.

Être nu, c’est une lettre d’amour à la vie, à l’humanité. Nues, les personnes sont belles. En se croisant au détour d’une promenade, leurs regards se disent :

« Vous êtes beaux, vous êtes belles ! Décidément, un rien vous habille ! »

Chances are you have already heard something about who anarchists are and what they are supposed to believe. Chances are almost everything you have heard is nonsense. Many people seem to think that anarchists are proponents of violence, chaos, and destruction, that they are against all forms of order and organization, or that they are crazed nihilists who just want to blow everything up. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. It is really a very simple notion. But it’s one that the rich and powerful have always found extremely dangerous.

At their very simplest, anarchist beliefs turn on to two elementary assumptions. The first is that human beings are, under ordinary circumstances, about as reasonable and decent as they are allowed to be, and can organize themselves and their communities without needing to be told how. The second is that power corrupts. Most of all, anarchism is just a matter of having the courage to take the simple principles of common decency that we all live by, and to follow them through to their logical conclusions. Odd though this may seem, in most important ways you are probably already an anarchist — you just don’t realize it.

Let’s start by taking a few examples from everyday life.

If there’s a line to get on a crowded bus, do you wait your turn and refrain from elbowing your way past others even in the absence of police?

If you answered “yes”, then you are used to acting like an anarchist! The most basic anarchist principle is self-organization: the assumption that human beings do not need to be threatened with prosecution in order to be able to come to reasonable understandings with each other, or to treat each other with dignity and respect.

Everyone believes they are capable of behaving reasonably themselves. If they think laws and police are necessary, it is only because they don’t believe that other people are. But if you think about it, don’t those people all feel exactly the same way about you? Anarchists argue that almost all the anti-social behavior which makes us think it’s necessary to have armies, police, prisons, and governments to control our lives, is actually caused by the systematic inequalities and injustice those armies, police, prisons and governments make possible. It’s all a vicious circle. If people are used to being treated like their opinions do not matter, they are likely to become angry and cynical, even violent — which of course makes it easy for those in power to say that their opinions do not matter. Once they understand that their opinions really do matter just as much as anyone else’s, they tend to become remarkably understanding. To cut a long story short: anarchists believe that for the most part it is power itself, and the effects of power, that make people stupid and irresponsible.

Are you a member of a club or sports team or any other voluntary organization where decisions are not imposed by one leader but made on the basis of general consent?

If you answered “yes”, then you belong to an organization which works on anarchist principles! Another basic anarchist principle is voluntary association. This is simply a matter of applying democratic principles to ordinary life. The only difference is that anarchists believe it should be possible to have a society in which everything could be organized along these lines, all groups based on the free consent of their members, and therefore, that all top-down, military styles of organization like armies or bureaucracies or large corporations, based on chains of command, would no longer be necessary. Perhaps you don’t believe that would be possible. Perhaps you do. But every time you reach an agreement by consensus, rather than threats, every time you make a voluntary arrangement with another person, come to an understanding, or reach a compromise by taking due consideration of the other person’s particular situation or needs, you are being an anarchist — even if you don’t realize it.

Anarchism is just the way people act when they are free to do as they choose, and when they deal with others who are equally free — and therefore aware of the responsibility to others that entails. This leads to another crucial point: that while people can be reasonable and considerate when they are dealing with equals, human nature is such that they cannot be trusted to do so when given power over others. Give someone such power, they will almost invariably abuse it in some way or another.

Do you believe that most politicians are selfish, egotistical swine who don’t really care about the public interest? Do you think we live in an economic system which is stupid and unfair?

If you answered “yes”, then you subscribe to the anarchist critique of today’s society — at least, in its broadest outlines. Anarchists believe that power corrupts and those who spend their entire lives seeking power are the very last people who should have it. Anarchists believe that our present economic system is more likely to reward people for selfish and unscrupulous behavior than for being decent, caring human beings. Most people feel that way. The only difference is that most people don’t think there’s anything that can be done about it, or anyway — and this is what the faithful servants of the powerful are always most likely to insist — anything that won’t end up making things even worse.

But what if that weren’t true?

And is there really any reason to believe this? When you can actually test them, most of the usual predictions about what would happen without states or capitalism turn out to be entirely untrue. For thousands of years people lived without governments. In many parts of the world people live outside of the control of governments today. They do not all kill each other. Mostly they just get on about their lives the same as anyone else would. Of course, in a complex, urban, technological society all this would be more complicated: but technology can also make all these problems a lot easier to solve. In fact, we have not even begun to think about what our lives could be like if technology were really marshaled to fit human needs. How many hours would we really need to work in order to maintain a functional society — that is, if we got rid of all the useless or destructive occupations like telemarketers, lawyers, prison guards, financial analysts, public relations experts, bureaucrats and politicians, and turn our best scientific minds away from working on space weaponry or stock market systems to mechanizing away dangerous or annoying tasks like coal mining or cleaning the bathroom, and distribute the remaining work among everyone equally? Five hours a day? Four? Three? Two? Nobody knows because no one is even asking this kind of question. Anarchists think these are the very questions we should be asking.

Do you really believe those things you tell your children (or that your parents told you)?

“It doesn’t matter who started it.” “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” “Clean up your own mess.” “Do unto others...” “Don’t be mean to people just because they’re different.” Perhaps we should decide whether we’re lying to our children when we tell them about right and wrong, or whether we’re willing to take our own injunctions seriously. Because if you take these moral principles to their logical conclusions, you arrive at anarchism.

Take the principle that two wrongs don’t make a right. If you really took it seriously, that alone would knock away almost the entire basis for war and the criminal justice system. The same goes for sharing: we’re always telling children that they have to learn to share, to be considerate of each other’s needs, to help each other; then we go off into the real world where we assume that everyone is naturally selfish and competitive. But an anarchist would point out: in fact, what we say to our children is right. Pretty much every great worthwhile achievement in human history, every discovery or accomplishment that’s improved our lives, has been based on cooperation and mutual aid; even now, most of us spend more of our money on our friends and families than on ourselves; while likely as not there will always be competitive people in the world, there’s no reason why society has to be based on encouraging such behavior, let alone making people compete over the basic necessities of life. That only serves the interests of people in power, who want us to live in fear of one another. That’s why anarchists call for a society based not only on free association but mutual aid. The fact is that most children grow up believing in anarchist morality, and then gradually have to realize that the adult world doesn’t really work that way. That’s why so many become rebellious, or alienated, even suicidal as adolescents, and finally, resigned and bitter as adults; their only solace, often, being the ability to raise children of their own and pretend to them that the world is fair. But what if we really could start to build a world which really was at least founded on principles of justice? Wouldn’t that be the greatest gift to one’s children one could possibly give?

Do you believe that human beings are fundamentally corrupt and evil, or that certain sorts of people (women, people of color, ordinary folk who are not rich or highly educated) are inferior specimens, destined to be ruled by their betters?

If you answered “yes”, then, well, it looks like you aren’t an anarchist after all. But if you answered “no”, then chances are you already subscribe to 90% of anarchist principles, and, likely as not, are living your life largely in accord with them. Every time you treat another human with consideration and respect, you are being an anarchist. Every time you work out your differences with others by coming to reasonable compromise, listening to what everyone has to say rather than letting one person decide for everyone else, you are being an anarchist. Every time you have the opportunity to force someone to do something, but decide to appeal to their sense of reason or justice instead, you are being an anarchist. The same goes for every time you share something with a friend, or decide who is going to do the dishes, or do anything at all with an eye to fairness.

Now, you might object that all this is well and good as a way for small groups of people to get on with each other, but managing a city, or a country, is an entirely different matter. And of course there is something to this. Even if you decentralize society and put as much power as possible in the hands of small communities, there will still be plenty of things that need to be coordinated, from running railroads to deciding on directions for medical research. But just because something is complicated does not mean there is no way to do it democratically. It would just be complicated. In fact, anarchists have all sorts of different ideas and visions about how a complex society might manage itself. To explain them though would go far beyond the scope of a little introductory text like this. Suffice it to say, first of all, that a lot of people have spent a lot of time coming up with models for how a really democratic, healthy society might work; but second, and just as importantly, no anarchist claims to have a perfect blueprint. The last thing we want is to impose prefab models on society anyway. The truth is we probably can’t even imagine half the problems that will come up when we try to create a democratic society; still, we’re confident that, human ingenuity being what it is, such problems can always be solved, so long as it is in the spirit of our basic principles — which are, in the final analysis, simply the principles of fundamental human decency.

Here’s 32 things I’ve learned that I hope help you in your journey:

1. It’s usually better to be nice than right.
2. Nothing worthwhile comes easy.
3. Work on a passion project, even just 30 minutes a day. It compounds.
4. Become a lifelong learner (best tip).
5. Working from 7am to 7pm isn’t productivity. It’s guilt.
6. To be really successful become useful.
7. Like houses in need of repair, problems usually don’t fix themselves.
8. Envy is like drinking poison expecting the other person to die.
9. Don’t hold onto your “great idea” until it’s too late.
10. People aren’t thinking about you as much as you think.
11. Being grateful is a cheat sheet for happiness. (Especially today.)
12. Write your life plan with a pencil that has an eraser.
13. Choose your own path or someone will choose it for you.
14. Never say, I’ll never…
15. Not all advice is created equal.
16. Be the first one to smile.
17. The expense of something special is forgotten quickly. The experience lasts a lifetime. Do it.
18. Don’t say something to yourself that you wouldn’t say to someone else.
19. It’s not how much money you make. It’s how much you take home.
20. Feeling good is better than that “third” slice of pizza.
21. Who you become is more important than what you accomplish.
22. Nobody gets to their death bed and says, I’m sorry for trying so many things.
23. There are always going to be obstacles in your life. Especially if you go after big things.
24. The emptiest head rattles the loudest.
25. If you don’t let some things go, they eat you alive.
26. Try to spend 12 minutes a day in quiet reflection, meditation, or prayer.
27. Try new things. If it doesn’t work out, stop. At least you tried.
28. NEVER criticize, blame, or complain.
29. You can’t control everything. Focus on what you can control.
30. If you think you have it tough, look around.
31. It's only over when you say it is.
32. One hand washes the other and together they get clean. Help someone else.

If you're lucky enough to get up to my age, the view becomes more clear. It may seem like nothing good is happening to you, or just the opposite. Both will probably change over time.

I'm still working (fractionally), and posting here, because business and people are my mojo. I hope you find yours.

Onward!

Louie

I'm not talking about paperback romance novels or the YA equivalents, like Twilight, because that makes sense to me -- those are written only with women readers in mind. I'm talking about examples like the Jim and Pam storyline in The Office. Watching something like that unfold can be so exciting for me, and I doubt that it's the same for guys. But maybe it is. But if not, why not?

I'm asking this question just as much to see if guys actually do enjoy a well-written love story as to understand why they don't, if that's the case.

To generalize for the purpose of an easy answer, let's think in stereotypically gendered terms. When it comes to love, men have an active role while women have a passive one.

What are the implications of this? It means that what a woman feels as the ups and downs, the mystery, the unknown, the excitement, etc., all things that define "blossoming" love, are things that happen to her. She is passive, she is the recipient. Her agency is contained in her response to these things.

But for a man, anything that makes "love" progress (or regress) pretty much directly stems from one of his actions. He does something or initiates and a woman responds/reciprocates. Because he does not have the gendered luxury of taking a backseat or passive role and watching things happen (if he does, nothing will; the woman will lose interest), he begins, by necessity, to view love as the cause and effect relationship that it more accurately is in reality (he does something, woman responds).

Seeing something like this takes a ton of the "magic" out of it. Compare it to seeing the sun rise every day. It becomes a lot less mystical, exciting, and dramatic when you know exactly why it happens and can simply see it for the cause and effect relationship that it truly is... you may even begin to take it for granted.

This is why romance eventually becomes well... unromantic for men. Romance is not a phenomenon, but instead a verb; it's a series of actions carried out by a man to earn a woman's affections... it's labor.

So when women or their SO makes romantic gestures to men, do they like it? Do men that were heavily pursued by women feel this way? What would be some good romantic gestures for men they would appreciate?

I wonder if this is true in same sex male couples too. Does one do the work over the other? Do they view romance the same or different?

Your answer is fantastic but it raises so many other questions

So when women or their SO makes romantic gestures to men, do they like it?

You're a little bit off the mark—you're actually describing an inversion of the gendered roles here (i.e. the woman is an active contributor while the man is a passive recipient or responder). While a man will appreciate such a gesture, it's not quite what composes the male romantic fantasy (more on this later).

Do men that were heavily pursued by women feel this way?

Men who aren't used to being pursued are usually confused or thrown off by the reversal of gendered roles. The result is the prevailing idea that men do not respond well to being approached first by women or even the autobiographical accounts from men describing instances where they couldn't respond well even if they were attracted to the woman approaching them. This is the men being shocked out of the traditional "script" of romance.

Secondly, when you talk about women pursuing men, that usually happens in a markedly different fashion than the way in which men pursue women (hint: it's more passive). A woman "aggressively" pursuing a man looks more like said woman going to extensive lengths to make it clear that she is available for pursuit rather than actively pursuing; the man is still usually leading things forward in some manner by handling the logistics of this romance. This is where you get those autobiographical stories from men about missing signals; "aggressive" pursuit from women is (usually) a set of passive signals that are clear to men who are experienced, but unclear to men not used to being "pursued."

I wonder if this is true in same sex male couples too.

I do too. I talk with a homosexual friend about stuff like this a lot, maybe I'll bring it up next time I see him.

The Male Romantic Fantasy

I'd say that men usually feel most loved when this normal state of affairs is negated; when they are made to believe that a woman's love is not conditional in the cause-and-effect manner described in the parent post. Love is work for men, but it can be rewarding work when things are going smoothly and the woman is happy as a result. But the male romantic fantasy is to be shown that the woman feels the same way and stands by him when he's down on his luck, when the money's not there, or when he's not feeling confident. He wants to know that the love he believes he's earned will stay even when the actions that feed it wane (however temporarily). A good woman can often lift a man up in his times of need and desperation and weather the storm even when things aren't going well. The male romantic fantasy is an enduring and unconditional love that seems to defy this relationship of labor and reward. A man wants to be loved for who he is, not for what he does in order to be loved.

An interesting way to examine this is to look at what women often call romantic entitlement. An entitled guy is a dude who maintains an unrealistic notion of men's typically active role in love. Before acknowledging reality, this boy uncompromisingly believes that he shouldn't have to do anything or change anything about himself to earn a woman's love; he wants to be loved for who he is, not what he does.

All men secretly want this, but there comes a day when they eventually compromise out of necessity. After that day, they may spend years honing themselves, working, shaping themselves into the men they believe women want to be chosen by. A massive part of what causes boys to "grow up" is the realization that being loved requires hard work. This impetus begins a journey where a boy grows into a man by gaining strength, knowledge, resources, and wisdom. The harsh realities of the world might harden and change him into a person his boyhood self wouldn't recognize. He might adopt viewpoints he doesn't agree with, transgress his personal boundaries, or commit acts he previously thought himself incapable of. But ultimately, the goal is to feel as if his work is done.

When he can finally let go of the crank he continually turns day after day in order to earn love and, even if only for a moment, it turns by itself to nourish him in return, that is when he will know he is loved.

Maintaining a free software project is spending years of your life to solve a problem that would have taken several hours or even days without the software.

Which is, joke aside, an incredible contribution to the common good.

The time saved is multiplied by the number of users and quickly compound. They are saving time without the need to exchange their own time.

Free software offers free time, free life extension to many human living now and maybe in the future.

Instead of contributing to the economy, free software developers contribute to humanity. To the global progress.

Free software is about making our short lifetimes a common good instead of an economical product.

The Death of Intellectual Curiosity

on the worst consequence of schools
Sven Schnieders
Jan 11, 2020

The questions we are trying to answer are as follows: why are some people curious and keep on learning throughout their lives and others do not? Why do most people stop learning after school? What happened to the quality of education in universities?

The only information most people consume is the news and other news-like content; they rarely read books. Even if they do, they read the thriller or romance novel which is currently number one on the NYT bestseller list. (I sometimes wonder how long it would take for one of those one-thriller-a-year people to notice when someone gifts them a book they have already read—preferably with a different cover—or if they would not notice at all.) There is nothing wrong with reading these kinds of books, but you do not learn anything new (besides who committed the murder).

Intellectual curiosity not only matters for the book choices of individuals, it is—more importantly—also essential for the progress of society. People who keep on learning every day are the ones who create new technologies by trial and error and make our lives better. This curiosity-driven tinkering creates wealth in a positive-sum manner and is one of the main factors behind the economic growth of our society. (“positive-sum” because everyone is better off after these new technologies have been created—a “win-win situation” where everyone gets wealthier.)

The following critique of the education system goes beyond merely pointing out that these institutions mostly do not deliver on their main promise of teaching valuable skills. I argue that these institutions also destroy the desire to learn. This destruction is, as we will see, a real catastrophe.

Professors Only Talk

Many people have heard of the “concept” of lifelong learning mostly from professors who are themselves not lifelong learners but think that it is a great idea. People who keep on learning throughout their lives do not talk in boring presentations about it, because for them it is not an abstract concept that has to be integrated into everyone’s life. They know that lifelong learning is not something that academics can persuade people to do, rather it is a natural consequence of intellectual curiosity. This is a key observation and changes the goal from “making people lifelong learners” to “making people intellectually curious.” Academics—not realizing this distinction—have been trying to persuade people into becoming lifelong learners by highlighting the importance of it; they should instead foster the natural curiosity and critical thinking of their students. This critical thinking would ironically relieve many of the same professors of their jobs—mostly those in the social “science” category.

So how do we make people intellectual curious? We do not need to, they already are. More accurately, they used to be. You see this curiosity is in children. They are learning machines asking questions all day, trying to figure out everything. Now a curious person might wonder: Why are there not many more intellectually curious adults? And that is exactly the right question. We will see later how schools and universities destroy this quality in most people. But first, we turn towards the discussion of learning and mental models.

Mental Models for a Better Life

We see the world not as it is but through our mental models, which help us to make sense of the world and with which we try to predict the future. When we learn and understand something new, we are making our mental models of the world less wrong. A superior model helps us better explain the world and more accurately predict the future. Here we will have to sidestep the epistemological discussion of how we know that some explanations are better than others since it would, unfortunately, go beyond the scope of this essay (I will probably discuss it in a future essay). But even without this discussion, we know that there are mental models and theories which predict the future more accurately. Also notice that we can only make those models “less wrong” and never perfect. This idea of falsification was popularized by Karl Popper and is the foundation of—all serious—modern science. The result of this epistemological viewpoint is that we need to be prepared for any of our mental models (theories) to be falsified at any given time because we can never be certain that something is true; there is no authority we can ask for the truth.

“Clear thinkers appeal to their own authority.” —Naval Ravikant

This might sound like a negative or pessimistic view, but it is not. A better way to look at it is that there is always room to improve our mental models of the world, and with them to improve our lives. In addition to that, once you have reasoned through an argumentation yourself an authority has no more power to change your mind than anyone else.

The Simplicity on the Other Side

Now we come back to the question from the start: Why do we not have more intellectually curious adults? The first reason is that people are intellectually lazy. This is not a novel observation but it explains part of the phenomenon. We need to keep in mind that when improving mental models, they get—at least at first—more complex. Things that seemed to be simple and certain become more nuanced and uncertain. For example, the view “We need to ban all guns!” might become more nuanced after seeing people all around the world getting suppressed by tyrannical governments with no way to defend themselves. Changes like this rarely happen because the former mental model is less complex and an easy “one fits all solution.” There is a strong bias for being consistent with your past choices and opinions, which makes changing them even more challenging. For political opinions, the social pressure for sticking with the opinions of your group can get extremely strong and people who nonetheless change their views are deterred for expressing them. Fortunately, this essay is more concerned with scientific mental models where the social pressure tends to play a smaller role.

An important counter-intuitive observation is that mental models do not keep increasing in complexity. Things get simpler after putting enough time and energy into understanding them. This is known as simplicity on the other side of complexity.

For any given subject or phenomenon, the y-axis (vertical) represents the complexity and the x-axis (horizontal) represents your degree of understanding. For any new subject, you start on the left with low complexity and low understanding. This means you have a lot of wrong assumptions and do not know how all the pieces fit together; you might think you know, but you are most likely wrong. As your understanding grows, the complexity increases as well. You learn that many of the assumptions you had were wrong or overly simplistic and that there is a lot more complexity to the interactions of all different variables than you taught. But after you understand more, things get simpler again. Everything “makes sense” and you know which factors matter so you can now focus on these few variables when analyzing the subject. Depending on the understanding you started with, the mental model “on the other side” is also simpler.

“For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.” —Oliver Wendell Holmes

The reason most people never experience this simplicity is that they confuse learning and understanding with what is happening in School and University; topics are taught in a way that only ever increases the complexity of mental models and just a small minority of people experience this other side of complexity.

Memorization is Not Understanding

The main reason for this ever-increasing complexity of mental models is that memorization is treated as learning. Everyone is only adding new facts to their mental models, seldom subtracting any or building new and deep connections. People forget everything they have “learned” (memorized) one week after the exam. Some students know that they do not possess any new knowledge or skills afterward—especially true in the social “sciences.”Students do not know what “real” learning feels like and that is a big problem; they do not know the difference between understanding and memorizing. If you have never seen someone confuse these two, this might sound impossible, but let me assure you that it is not. I have often had the experience of someone saying they understand an equation when they had merely memorized it—knowing how to use the formula is not the same as understanding it.

This confusion is also part of the reason why people today think they cannot understand all major theories any more. The mainstream view on this is that in ancient times it was indeed possible to understand everything that was understood, but now there are too many subjects and no one has enough time to study them all. This view is flawed. Knowledge is indeed getting broader because there are more and more individual subjects. But people forget that the depth of our explanations is increasing as well; one theory today can explain more than one theory in the past could. Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell, for example, combined the fields of electricity and magnetism into electromagnetism. Understanding this single theory is easier than understanding two separate theories and also gives you more explanatory power. In this race between broader knowledge and deeper explanations (how much one explanation can explain), depth seems to be coming out on top. It is now easier to understand all major theories than it was in ancient times. However, this is impossible if you only memorize. You need to understand those theories. (For an in-depth epistemological discussion of this topic I recommend reading David Deutsch’s “The Beginning of Infinity”.)

Another problem is that especially in the social “sciences,” the exams are built on the principle of memorization. This means that people who are trying to understand something (if there is anything to understand at all) are at a disadvantage. Understanding takes more time and when only superficial facts are queried, it is unnecessary. Questioners often want to know the name of the author of a specific model and not how this model works. Knowing the name is close to useless in a time when the internet exists. This is one of many signs that universities are less about learning than about mindless work and credentials. These credentials are not an indicator of how much a person has learned, rather they show how hard a person is willing to work to satisfy some arbitrary criteria. Honest learning and understanding are not fostered, instead “hacking exams” is. Paul Graham wrote about this problem in “The lesson to Unlearn”: “But wasting your time is not the worst thing the educational system does to you. The worst thing it does is to train you that the way to win is by hacking bad tests.” His main point is that people get taught that the best way to succeed in life is by hacking tests. For example, people try to “cheat” at fundraising for their company by gaming some metric instead of building a great product. This is obviously a bad long-term strategy since you cannot fool reality­—or even investors—forever.

Knowing how much mindless work people are willing to do is valuable knowledge for most employers, especially as the company size grows and work gets more and more mechanical. In big companies, individual contributions (value created) are hard to detect, which means more—hackable—metrics need to be used to assess employees. One of the results is that in tech companies today, people are still getting paid for the amount of time they put in, even though the output—the value they create—does not correlate much with this input. A great software engineer can in one hour create the same amount of value that a decent engineer creates in one day.

We Know Very Little

Another way schools and universities destroy curiosity is by presenting answers as absolute and certain. The world gets portrait overly simplified and the words “We don’t really know how X works.” are rarely used. Part of this simplification is necessary to teach certain subjects, but the problem is that students do not get taught that the real world is way more complex than these models and that a lot of things are only poorly understood—an especially big problem in social “sciences.”

Let’s take a look at evolution. Most people think that the problem of how life evolved on earth has been solved by Charles Darwin, but it is not that easy. Evolution through natural selection explains a big part of this question but not everything and even combined with sexual selection, some problems remain that cannot be satisfactorily explained with this theory. The "Cambrian Explosion” 500 million years ago remains one of the major challenges for traditional evolutionary theory to explain. In a relatively short time frame a lot of complex organisms appeared; something difficult to explain for the traditional theory. This led people like Stuart Kauffman to put forth some interesting theories (in his case self-organization) to explain this phenomenon. I am not trying to discredit the traditional evolutionary theory. I am merely pointing out how little we know and how much there is to learn about the world.

To someone suggesting that it is not possible to teach a subject while at the same time point out how little we know, I recommend reading “Six Easy Pieces” by Richard Feynman. This book is an excerpt of the popular “Feynman Lectures on Physics” and a great example of someone teaching a subject while fostering curiosity by pointing out how little we understand. The reason that not many more professors are doing this is twofold. First, most of them do not know the limits of their field and knowledge. Second, in some disciplines would be very little left to teach and those same professors would lose their jobs. This outcome is desirable since destroying curiosity and—in the case of social “science”—teaching half-truth (at best) and false “facts” (at worst) is not creating value for society.

The Death of the Individual

Schools and universities also take all the fun out of learning by forcing everyone to study a subject in a rigid and planned manner. This is an inevitable drawback of educating a lot of people in the same way—only limited space for individuality; as a result studying topics gets more difficult and boring. The solution is autodidacticism—learning things on your own. We live in an age where anyone with the desire to learn and access to the internet can learn anything for (almost) free. Previously the means for learning where scares, now it is only the desire.

Once you start studying on your own—out of pure curiosity—you will notice a big difference in the way you understand and retain new information. The relevance of any given information used to be determined by how important it was for passing the exam. Now you get to decide which information is worth keeping and which is not. This skill—detecting a signal in all the noise of information and discarding everything else—is one of the most important skills to acquire in our modern information age. Ideally, you use boredom as your natural content filter, allowing yourself to only study what you are naturally interested in.

Skin in the Game

So how did we get to this point? As with every system that does not improve over time, the answer is no skin in the game. Without a free market for universities–and more generally for education—where the consumers decide the value of a service, there will not be any improvement. Bad universities need to go bankrupt so that the education system as a whole can improve. The same for bad professors. This problem has been addressed by projects like “Lambda School” where students don’t pay upfront for their education, but afterward and only if they get a high paying job. This puts the university’s skin back into the game. If they don’t teach their students valuable skills (meaning valued by society and not by some bureaucrat), they go bankrupt.

The Internet to the Rescue

The internet—as always—has already helped to solve this problem by providing a free market for education and knowledge. This not only improves the quality of the information—after filtering yourself—but also lowers the cost. There is no longer a central authority to decide what knowledge is “true” and “important enough” to be taught. The same thing the internet did to media is now happening to education. The gatekeepers (Universities) get removed and the responsibility now lies with the individual. Many subjects that are currently being taught at university will probably not survive the test of the free market (and the test of time). Especially the ones that are more concerned with political indoctrination than with education (economics, gender studies, etc.) will have a hard time surviving because they provide no valuable knowledge—again, this means useful to society. We can use the Lindy effect to predict which subjects will survive. This effect says that for non-perishables things like ideas, books, technology, or music the expected lifetime increases with every day they survive. This means that music that has survived 100 years is excepted to survive another 100 years. Once that piece of music has survived 200 years it is expected to survive another 200 years. New things are likely to be replaced by other new things while old —time tested—things are anticipated to stay around for even longer. With this in mind, we can take a look at the subjects taught at universities and infer that Math, Physics, Philosophy, Biology,…, are probably still going to be around for a very long time, while new subjects will be replaced by other even newer ones. The internet allows the speed of iteration to increase significantly, providing people with knowledge and skills that are valuable in the present.

Overall this is a positive view of the future of education. People are already able to learn anything they want on their own with very little or no cost. The possibilities of educating yourself on the internet will only increase. To take advantage of this shift in education, the only thing you need is intellectual curiosity—to see learning as something you do for fun in your “free time.”

Protect your intellectual curiosity at all costs because it is one of your most important assets.

Pour réfléchir un peu sur notre place dans l'univers

On dirait que je suis libéral en lisant ça

Tous les grands hommes se sont forgés des rituels pour parvenir à la maîtrise de leur art.

Par Alain Goetzmann

Lorsque nous regardons les œuvres de Picasso, écoutons Mozart ou lisons Cervantès, nous sommes transportés par la beauté et le message profond que nos sens devinent. Mais ce que nous apprécions est un résultat et non la somme des efforts et le travail considérable que ces génies de l’humanité ont dû investir pour parvenir à la perfection. Tous les grands hommes, depuis l’origine, se sont forgés des rituels pour parvenir à la maîtrise de leur art. Comme eux, sachez vous fixer des buts et investissez-vous dans leur poursuite :

1. Fixez-vous des objectifs de maîtrise, pas des objectifs d’égo
Vouloir maîtriser ce que l’on fait et s’imposer de le faire chaque jour un peu mieux n’implique pas de développer une attitude prétentieuse ou un comportement arrogant. Bien au contraire, le chemin vers la maîtrise est pavé de modestie, voire d’humilité.

2. Faites des choses dures et difficiles
Faire des choses faciles est à la portée du premier venu. Pour se fortifier et s’endurcir, il faut sortir de sa zone de confort, se mettre en danger et tenter d’élargir les frontières de son savoir et de son pouvoir. En procédant ainsi vous deviendrez de plus en plus créatif et affermirez votre volonté.

3. Apprenez de votre histoire personnelle
Comme les mêmes attitudes produisent toujours les mêmes résultats, l’analyse de vos actions passées et le résultat auquel vous êtes arrivé vous en disent long sur ce qui marche et ce qui ne marche pas. Arbitrez en faveur des actions qui donnent des résultats. Ce sont généralement les plus difficiles mais cela en vaut la peine.

4. Cherchez l’inspiration
Contrairement à l’image populaire, l’inspiration vient rarement, allongé au soleil, bras croisés sous la tête, un brin d’herbe à la lèvre. L’inspiration qui conduit à des performances exceptionnelles vient naturellement de la pratique de son art, jour après jour.

5. La qualité de vos routines détermine le calibre de vos performances
Cela peut paraître curieux mais la maîtrise passe par des routines scrupuleusement respectées. C’est parce qu’on s’engage dans une action en respectant les habitudes qui ont fait réussir d’autres actions similaires qu’on se donne les moyens de la réussite. Ne les négligez surtout pas.

6. « Chaque Maître a été un débutant et chaque professionnel un amateur »
Gardez cette phrase en mémoire pour les moments de découragement. Les plus grands ont commencé petits. Ce qu’un homme a réussi, un autre peut le faire. La maîtrise est le résultat de la volonté et de la pratique sans cesse renouvelée. Qu’est-ce que je veux vraiment ? Quel est le résultat de ce que je recherche ? Quel est le prix que je suis prêt à payer ? De vos réponses dépend votre degré de maîtrise.

So true

CLIMB THAT GODDAMN MOUNTAIN
Because in the end, you won't remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn.

The best things in life aren't things

Tellement vrai. Il est temps de se séparer de certaines choses.

Inspirant. Tout n'est pas encore perdu :)

Collect moments. Not things.

Finalement ce poème n'est pas de Pablo Neruda mais de Martha Medeiros

Il meurt lentement
celui qui ne voyage pas,
celui qui ne lit pas,
celui qui n’écoute pas de musique,
celui qui ne sait pas trouver grâce à ses yeux.

Il meurt lentement
celui qui détruit son amour-propre,
celui qui ne se laisse jamais aider.

Il meurt lentement
celui qui devient esclave de l’habitude
refaisant tous les jours les mêmes chemins,
celui qui ne change jamais de repère,
Ne se risque jamais à changer la couleur de ses vêtements
Ou qui ne parle jamais à un inconnu.

Il meurt lentement
celui qui évite la passion et son tourbillon d’émotions
celles qui redonnent la lumière dans les yeux
et réparent les coeurs blessés

Il meurt lentement
celui qui ne change pas de cap
lorsqu’il est malheureux au travail ou en amour,
celui qui ne prend pas de risques pour réaliser ses rêves,
celui qui, pas une seule fois dans sa vie,
n’a fui les conseils sensés.

Vis maintenant !
Risque-toi aujourd’hui !
Agis tout de suite !
Ne te laisse pas mourir lentement !
Ne te prive pas d’être heureux !

Martha Medeiros