I know nothing about finance, but hear me out.
A lot of things have happened in my life in the last month.
I’ve quit my job as a doctor in Switzerland 16 month ago, moved to Croatia, traveled to Bali, Indonesia, gave up everything I possessed in material terms and stopped censoring my words.
This drastically changed the people that surrounded me.
I then went on a journey to find my medium as an artist, lived in a studio in a big and crazy artist house with 200 fellow artists in Berlin, took classes in oil painting, landscape painting, welding etc. and wrote as much as I had before, but realised that my work qualified as poetry.
Through the people I met, I became part of a tiny online community of poets that were extremely talented, skilled and helped and encouraged each other.
I isolated myself from all unwanted outside stimuli and uncompromisingly lived exactly by my own biorhythm.
I slept from 4 am to 12 pm everyday, switched my watches to a different timezone and learned to deal with the many “why”s, “stop”s and “how weird”s.
It was an intense and challenging time of growth, that will likely be indispensable for my art.
When I had only 3000 Euros left from what I had saved up in Switzerland, I decided to buy a one way flight to Bali. Winter was coming in Germany and I wanted to surf.
I knew that the conventional, smart decision would have been to start looking for a job in Berlin and find ways to reintegrate myself into society. But that was not what I wanted.
- I knew that if I would go on my last cash, I would corner myself. -
I am a master procrastinator. I only start doing anything when the deadline is right in my face. I knew that by leaving then anything could happen and it did. I wanted to see which direction I would run in, when I would struggle mentally and financially.Would I go back to safety or keep on pushing forward into my lifelong dream of writing and living as an artist ?The time of struggling is now and you are looking at the answer.
I am writing and I have never been more excited about my future.
It build slow, but it did.
On Bali I printed and bound my first ever poetry-anthology.
(you can read excerpts of it here)
I fell in love with someone who not only supports my dreams and believes in me, but is on a similar journey to self-expression as well.
I started communicating with uncompromisable honesty and started connecting with people based on what we like and not on what we dislike together.
I am learning to stop pretending and it is one of the most relieving feelings in the world.
I started feeling something that I had been waiting for since I was about sixteen years old. The awakening of humanity to the fact that we are a giant organism.
I understood this when I read an article on fish swarm intelligence with 16 on the toilet, but I didn’t find much fertile soil for the ideas of the global brain and our role in a future intergalactic society then.
7 years ago I started to write a play about the similarities in between the internet and the human brain, that focused on how disconnecting from the net for a state has much in common with the pathology of brain cancer.
I had long wondered how long it would take humanity to change the thought-vector in the direction pointing towards a global organism and progress to the next stage of intelligence, which I believe will understand the world in cycles and abolish the concept of linearity.
I believe that this time is now.
I have never been more excited about the future than today.
I always thought that our lifetime would be interesting because we are the first, or maybe the second generation that could destroy the planet if we were stupid enough to do so.
I knew that there would be big and exciting technologies that would decide whether the evolutionary experiment intelligence was successful.
I always believed that our species would come to its senses and start protecting its host organism ( the planet earth and all it entails) before it is too late,
I am convinced now that we are starting to and it is very exciting.
There are many revolutionary changes going on in the world right now and I find it almost impossible not to be filled with passion and a sense of purpose.
The internet is the single biggest technological revolution since humanity learned how to write. Here are just a few things that I believe will happen in the future
Lifetime of Generation Y
The internet will succeed the concept of nations.
The physical and the digital reality will melt.
Capitalism will transform from a system focused on the concept of individuality to a concept that understands that there is no individual self, which is a logical consequence of the next stage of evolution.
The internet will give rise to global consciousness which will assume the same functions for the planet earth that our higher nervous system assumes for our body ( to just name two : Interaction with the environment and maintaining homeostasis )
We will be able to upload what we perceive to be individual consciousness and have intelligent programs that think and feel like our deceased. They will likely not only be filled with the deceased’s memories, but also keep on evolving in the cloud. I also do not see why they would be mortal. I actually wonder if we might completely transition from physical bodies to digital entities at some point in the far future, but that belongs in a science fiction story and not into this little article. ( if you have time to write it before I do, shoot me a message)
After Generation Y
We will start harvesting resources from space which will lead to the next, large growth period in future human history ( much like the bronze or iron age I presume )
We might discover other planets with lifeforms (but when is just pure speculation right now and goes beyond the scope of my present fantasy)
Whatever the case, some of these changes are happening as we speak and I believe that one of the most interesting ones is currently fought for who controls the monetary system of the future.
The players are national banks vs. the internet.
One in the form of traditional currencies and the other in the form of cryptocurrencies.
It is clear to me who will win in the long run, I know too little about the structures of the systems of these different currencies to know which one of them will persevere against the others and have to rely on the people I trust to make this decision.
But I do believe that so far all cryptocurrencies are in the same team against the old players and the big wars in between them will not be fought until a few month from now.
Nevertheless, tempers are high and a false rumor, misbehaviour by a figure representing the currencies or a serious attack on them could still scare investors away.
But in the long run the outcome is clear.
There is something peculiar about an idea that is right. Right in the evolution of ideas means that it predicts the future outcomes of current behaviours accurately.
To be the only one who knows that an idea is right will make you feel very lonely and can even send you over the edge of insanity.
To be part of a small group that is convinced of an idea can feel like a revelation and to see an idea making it into common knowledge is something that I am still looking forward to experience.
It is that space in between crazy and trivial that we are in right now.
It doe not matter who’s idea it is, that is which physical body was the medium of it’s delivery, but simply that it is in the world. I do not think ideas or anything to be precise, can be possessed by anyone.
When it comes to the internet, we all feel that the above ideas are true.
Some of us might see them more and some less clearly.
Listen to what Elon Musk the founder of Paypal, SpaceX and Tesla Motors had to say about this and his late college days here (first few minutes).
All of this being said, here is a word of warning :
Take all my advice with a grain of salt and be aware of the fact that I might potentially be a madman.
The way I understand the world, functions in a similar way that my favourite science fiction authors understand it (e.g. Gibson and Bester ). I dip in and out of streams of the collective subconsciousness and let my imagination run wild. By trying not to consciously interfere with my thoughts and gut feelings too much, I trust that they represent the totality of conscious and subconscious stimuli that my perceptive apparatus is exposed to.
My conceptual system then applies some form of secret magic sauce and produces the claims and ideas you read in my writing.
I am a product of the variables that act on me, possibly with a little twist called free will
( but I will still have to figure that one out )
My thoughts are the outcome of the way I live my life.
They are the product of the people I surround myself with, the media I consume and the physical and digital environments I spend my time in.
One of the roles of an artist in society is to show alternative perspectives when looking at the same reality.
This is mine.
You have to decide whether you make it yours as well.
htttps://fromgenerationy.com