It is an everlasting continuous series of jumps. Up and down and forwards and sometimes even backwards.

Why can I not stay in one place for a little longer?

I take what I like and I move to the next before knowing whether I even really liked it.

I can never say I know anything because I am always in a rush to jump away from it.

That is all I know. Jump and jump and jump.

It is tiresome to jump when you are not actually a rabbit, but a human being.

Humans were not made to jump around. They were meant to saunter. To walk slowly and experience fully.

There is limited space for air when you are all stuffed with useless pieces that do not go together. I am not a whole being. I am made of parts and these parts are not made for each other.

Looks like I am not a rabbit either.

At least a rabbit is a whole rabbit. I am half human, half rabbit, half serious.

Let me just, please, let me get a leg massage.

Every day I lay my bare face on display and let people do whatever they want with it. They drag me in all directions at once and take possession of me. Make me their own. And I am not saying it is wrong, for I know it is my decision. I am aware that the moment something leaves my draft and is shipped out into the screens of others, that piece is no longer mine. It is everyone else’s. I become a commodity for consumption.

Yet I continue because I hope that my presence on this seemingly cold and dark web could make some difference. But the longer I stay the more dubious I get. No one ever truly understands what I mean. There is always the personal aspect of interpretation, the subjective which is different for everyone and can therefore never be understood exactly how I meant it. Which is a scary thing. And a sad thing. That no one will ever truly understand me. But that goes not just for the things I create, but for the way that I am. There will never be any single person who can understand me fully. Therefore, no person can ever love me fully for who I am.

Can you be loved without being known? I know I can love without knowing, I have done so many times before. It is one of my weaknesses. The door to my love chamber is almost aways open. It requires only a bit of breath in my ear or a touch on my shoulder and it opens fully. For I have much love available to those I see fit.

The first time I fell in love, for example, did not require any long relation. We met and spent some time together, not even romantically. It was enough time, however, to envision everything. My mind is great at scenarios and storytelling when I have some point of reference. But the point of reference has to be rooted in something real and something I believe in. And he was. Both. But not for long, for we lost contact and he was not seemingly interested in keeping it. Yet I continued borrowing his costume for my dreams. He kept showing up and I grew more and more fond of him. Up until the point that I very much did love him.

And you can laugh and say that such love is not to be called love, for it is a childish obsession with something that is not even real. But I do love him. I love him so, and I will say that until there is no more love coming from my heart. How difficult it is to get over someone that you have nothing on. I knew him for such a short period that he didn’t have time to do anything that I would find annoying. He never did me any wrong.

I wish he would have told me something hurtful.

Told me it would never be us and that he would want me to shut up and stay away from him. To leave him the hell alone. But he didn’t. He just waved at me and that was the last time I saw him. And I think about that goodbye often. Partly because I don’t have that many moments with him, so I have to replay the ones I can, but mainly because I felt he knew he would not be bothered to keep in touch with me. I was just a person on his path and now it was splitting, and we weren’t ever going back on the same one. I however felt otherwise and would have died to touch his hands again. For I did touch his hands. As if he was a pastor or a priest or whoever touches your hands when you’re down.

Bless me holy father for I have sinned. I have spent years longing for something that will never be and I have fooled myself into loving someone who I don’t even know.

But then again, is not all love directed towards the unknown somehow?

New friends are made quite seldom, but when they are, it feels like the beginning of a new life. As your relationship builds largely onto things you have in common - your likes and dislikes - it feels as if, for a brief moment, you met someone who understands.

Old friends do not understand you, at least not the present you, the person you are at this exact hour. For they have known you through time. For them, you are just as much the person you were 7 years ago as the person you are today. It is difficult to see then, blinded by the honeymoon phase of the encounter with a new friend, that the old friend loves your soul - the eternal you.

New friends, created by these brief interactions over short periods, are not made to last. Their very beauty lies in the goodbye. You both know it is not forever, but for now, you hold a particularly strong love for each other. At parting, you feel such a tenderness towards this new friend. Your heart has etched their name on the chamber wall, here it will stay forever.

The thing is, none of you would ever say this to one another. Because admitting that you feel so strongly, quite frankly, is a bit embarrassing. Like a 13 year old insisting that they love their new girlfriend.

But the love you have at 13 and the love you have at the parting with a new friend, is not any less worthy. Love is a feeling that is inherent to all people, at all ages, at all times. It can be built over years or it can befall at any moment.

This is not to say, tell your new friend that you love them. For maybe this is exactly what makes the new friend so magical. That you don’t really know how they feel about you, but you have an inkling, a pretty strong one, that they feel the same exact way. And in that inkling, you can do a lot of thinking, a lot of pondering of what could be - how this person could have become your best of friends.

This sort of reverie will last forever. In this way, and only in this way, the new friend turns into an old friend.

I was in 9th grade and we were writing a paper in nynorsk. Nynorsk, if you aren’t familiar with the Norwegian language, is sort of like the lesser used, more hated version of it. Everyone have to learn it in school even though a very small number of people actually use it. Personally, I have always been a fan of nynorsk, it is a beautiful, more gentle version of the Norwegian language, perfectly suited poetry, for example.

We were approaching end of term, and all students who were between a 5 and a 6 (the grading system in Norway works from 1-6, where 6 is best), had the chance to write one last paper to prove their worth. Or, not their worth, but their knowledge, and then if you did well you would get the best grade - you know how these things work.

Naturally, writing a text in Nynorsk, I felt it only right to write about something that would be slightly sad. Nynorsk has a specific way of making the sad turn bittersweet turn beautiful. It is something about the softness that makes even the harshest of sentences feel like a gentle brushstroke down your spine.

For example:

The norwegian word for “love”

Bokmål (most commonly used):
Kjærlighet

Nynorsk:
Kjærleik (does it not look so much softer?)

I decided to write a text about “good girl syndrome”. That winter I had heard my aunt talk about it, she was a teacher for students my age, and I could relate to a lot of the things she was describing. For example, really trying to get the best grades in all subjects, even if having them makes practically no difference, because you are after all, in 9th grade.

I used the first person for natural reasons as well. Really, I think I have written maybe 3 things in third person, like ever. I can write more honest in first-person. The moment the sentence starts with “she”, a distance is established. I am not able to expose my inner thought-chambers.

I have not read this text since I wrote it 9 years ago, but let’s just say it ended up in my dads email inbox.

You may want to talk to her about this. Best regards, my Norwegian teacher.

And I loved my Norwegian teacher, he was the best teacher I have ever had, and he is yet to be surpassed by any other. Which is why it felt like such a violation. I thought he would understand my text for what it was. For the ART of it. I thought he knew that I had some humor, some irony. That nynorsk requires this amount of theatrise. Of course there was truth to it, there is always truth to fiction. In fact, I believe that fiction is truer than any non-fiction, because it comes directly from your body, and what can be truer than that?

Instead he pitied me. What I thought would be given a plus for its rawness and for its honesty, was taken for simple complaining. Nothing more than a cry for help. I felt like the child I probably was.

He thought I was taking everything too seriously, or, he thought I was taking myself too seriously, when really what I wanted to achieve with the text was the complete opposite: to lay myself bare and laugh at it.

It was kind of ironic, can’t you see? Don’t you know that I know that it is not that serious? Of course I know it is not that serious.

I am 14 and grades are just a number but I want to create SOMETHING of importance. It is not about the grade it is about wanting to do something significant. And I thought he understood, and maybe he did, but under the teacher-obligated-brain-fog decided to send it to my dad to rid himself from any responsibility.

Norwegian teacher, if you read this, which I doubt that you are, as you don’t feel like a guy that would read substack, I am yet to forgive you for what you did.

Thank you for giving me a 6 though.

Now, this was all brought to the surface again with the response I received after my last post.

This feeling of not being properly understood.
Guys, I really thought you would get it. That it is not that serious, but like, that it also is? I am, after all, a masochist in its most vanilla definition. And I thought you would understand that.

That feeling of someone older looking down on you, telling you they have been there and that it will be ok. HA! That is the worst feeling in the world.

And I know you “didn’t mean it like that”, that your worry was out of the kindness of your hearts, but don’t you see? You were supposed to laugh, at least a little.

Either way I can best explain it as a grieving sensation.

At this odd hour, when I am kicked brutally out of my sleep, I instinctively ask myself what happened. For it feels as if I had gone to bed after a major incident and temporarily slept away my sorrows. When you wake up after such sleep, it can be felt throughout your whole body, but especially the chest. If you are to take a deep breath, your lungs won’t fill properly with air, instead, your eyes will fill with water.

Now, I know why this is happening, and that makes it even worse.

My ambition is grieving my potential.

You see, I have never in real life confirmed the expectations made for me by my own imagination. I am equally convinced that I can become anything and that I will never become anything at all. When I wake up in the middle of the night it is because my brain tells me we are running out of time. Do something great now, for you don’t know what tomorrow brings, it could very well be death.

Despite this grief over what could have been, I am terribly proud. My pride therefore rests not on proven action, but on the firm belief that I am capable of anything. Meaning it is unanchored, my pride lacks evidence, creating a rollercoaster of an existence where I constantly go from arrogant to apologetic.

There is nothing I cannot do, yet I have not done anything at all.

Well, of course I have done things, but never out of significance. I post videos to the internet and receive some pixelated hearts and upward-pointing thumbs in return. I talk about things I have no business talking about. I film myself alone in my room and spend too much time doing it. For what?

It is all vanity, keeping me stagnant. It is a feeling of achievement without really achieving anything at all.

Yet I continue, for it feels safer than making real effort. It fills a certain void, I am producing something. But then, apparently not enough for my heartache to disappear completely.

The state I am in can be best described as having a safe with a lost key. No, worse actually, you have never even had the key in the first place. Yet you go on living beside this safe, dragging it with you, feeling its weight, and because it is of such heavy weight, you have persuaded yourself that something precious must lie inside.

Yet you continuously avoid the real effort of trying to break it open. You could beat it with a sledgehammer, or shoot it with a rifle. You could try hurling it down the tallest building in the world.

But you are not sure whether you are prepared to endure all that disgrace for the sake of something that might not even exist. You imagine the safe splitting open below you, completely empty. You imagine the laughter of the people now gathered around it, laughing because you had carried it desperately, all the way to the top, thrown it off, only for it to be completely empty.

So instead you keep on waking up with heartache in the middle of the night.

You keep still, make ridiculous and baseless efforts, because you do not know what is worse: to suffer a little every day, or to gamble your whole life on one immense suffering.

There is also no world hunger, no wars, no fighting. Just a peaceful and pleasurable existence.

You do still have to work. But worry not, your education would prepare you for a career that you were perfectly suited for. No matter what you become, you would feel fulfilled doing it. But your career would also be secondary to the rest of your life, which would mainly center around leisure. Spending time with other people, doing sports, going to the movies, and other such activities that would allow for a life completely void of boredom.

A frictionless life.
Designed to feel like a never-ending vacation.

All this is, if you remember to take your daily pill distributed by the government. This pill is called soma and it removes all sad feelings.
Leaving you only experiencing pleasure.

Now that you know all that this pill will give you.
Would you take it?

It is easy to instantly brush off and say, of course I wouldn’t take it.

Friction and pain and suffering is part of human existence, and removing it is utterly insane.

But, I think we are already…taking it. Only it is not in the shape of a pill.

The scenario I described here is roughly how the world of Aldous Huxleys “Brave new world” looks like. This is a book often brought up together with Orwells 1984. Both of these have been discussed in greater numbers recently due to the uncertainties that AI has brought with it.

But Orwell imagined a controlled world through surveillance, fear, bans and restrictions - which is where it differs from Houxley. Because Huxley imagined something arguably worse - control through pleasure. A dystopia nobody even considers fighting, because it feels good.

So in this video I look at whether we might actually have built our very own soma. This soma is the combination of social media, the attention economy, the feed, the algorithm, AI, and the fact that we are doing it all alone. None of which has been forced on us by any law. Rather it is something we line up for, swallow whole, just like in Brave New World.

Why pleasure is such a good trap

Because if you think about it - what is more important to us than feeling good?

We search for meaning because meaning could potentially make us feel good.

We work out because it makes us feel good, maybe not while doing it, but definitely after.

Doomscrolling makes us feel good in the moment. It gives us a certain momentary pleasure.

As does sleeping in.

Or a perfectly toasted bagel with extra cream cheese, sliced tomato and a drizzle olive oil.

We go to university because it makes us feel good to have a degree. It feels safe.

It feels good to make your parents proud.

We even self sabotage because it, in some skewed way, makes us feel better.

All we do is make choices that might make us feel good.

So why does it still feel like Brave New World is missing something fundamental?

Why is it considered a dystopian novel, when everyone is feeling good? And no one is actually being forced into it?

To best answer this question I will bring in one of my favorite living and breathing philosophers - Byung Chul Han. Han talks about the disappearance of constructive negativity in our current society, and the consequences that inevitably come with that removal.

Quote:

“Not all negativity is destructive. Not infrequently, forms of negativity such as hesitation, pausing, boredom, waiting, or rage prove constructive, though they are threatened with disappearance in the course of society’s increasing positivization”

Boredom is often where the greatest and most creative thoughts are formed. Waiting allows for pauses. Hesitation is where judgment enters. If we remove all of that, if we continue to optimize the present until it “excludes all disaster,“ as Han puts it, we don’t get a better human being. We get the humans in Brave New World. Comfortable, constantly amused, well-fed, and also, completely hollow.

And to Han, everything in our world is being built to remove this negativity. Like our quest to ultimate convenience, to hyper optimization and automation, all made possible through our current technology. Everything is built to be fun, quick and enjoyable - if it is boring, it will simply not survive.

Even work is framed as a game. Hustle culture, Linkedin warriors, the fetishisation of productivity and systems. Have you not found success, my dear friend, you haven’t tried hard enough. Level up.

But…. is it all that dark?

Okay, before this turns into a “phones bad” talk, I will talk about the good things that come with the removal of friction and introduction of technology and modern tools. For it has also, objectively, been one of the best things humanity has ever invented.

Friction used to mean dying of a tooth infection. It meant being the only gay kid in a small town with no way of knowing anyone else like you existed. It meant that if the library was far away, you simply couldn’t get the information. The algorithms I am criticising is also what connected isolated people, surfaced niche knowledge, gave people livelihoods.

Nobody wants to go back to the plague. That is not what I am saying.

But this is where we have to be very awake. Because a dystopia arriving through obvious oppression gets resisted. When something is obviously wrong, you know how to push back, because the enemy is clear.
But when it arrives through a series of individually reasonable conveniences, every next step feels like an upgrade. Why would you need to be forced to use a delivery app? We will reach for it voluntarily, hell, we will line up for it, for it is desirable. Just like we line up for every tool that promises to make our lives a little easier.

The citizens of Brave New World weren’t oppressed, at least not by the look of it.

They handed over their agency voluntarily, in exchange for comfort and security.

We will soon do the same. Hand over all our rights to AI and tech giants, in exchange for safety and for getting a breakfast burrito delivered to our door in less than 10 minutes.

The soma/some factory

One thing I kept thinking about while reading the book was that some of the citizens must have worked at the soma factory? If everyone takes this drug, it must require a pretty large production plant. Meaning they would literally help manufacture the very drug that kept them numbed down. And they probably also felt perfectly fulfilled doing it. Or maybe they weren’t even aware that that was what they were producing.

Are we aware of who produces our soma?

This June I was invited to Cannes Lions, which is the advertising industry’s biggest festival. Basically one week of networking on the french riviera while celebrating the year’s best work in advertising.

I want to take a quick moment just to shout out Darkroom, who invited me, a marketing agency that managed to organize a genuinely interesting event with conversations that actually gave me something.

But I also need to mention that during my time in Cannes, walking the installations to big tech, I couldn’t stop thinking about Brave New World.

This is our soma factory.

What was being celebrated was essentially the craft of capturing attention. The manufacturing of what keeps us scrolling.

Soma removes sad feelings, the feed removes boredom. Soma keeps you feeling good, the algorithm keeps you comfortably numb. Neither is forced on you. The citizens line up for their ration the same way we reach for our phones. Both hands us a small reliable pleasure, right now, in exchange for something.

Obtaining particular information once used to be filled with friction. Maybe you had to go to the library and search for hours. Maybe the library was far away. Maybe you actually learnt more from your experience obtaining the information than from the information itself.

Now the information is seeking you. Screaming at you for your attention. You don’t even need to ask a question to be presented with a solution.

So no, our soma might not be a pill from a World State.

It’s an algorithm. Something that was designed, deliberately, by truly talented people, some of whom hand each other trophies for it on the French Riviera every June.

Customized Soma

There is one difference though. Soma numbed everyone in the same way. With the same pill.

Our soma, however, is personalized.

It has studied you, and it knows exactly what you like.

But as is the case when you are always served the things you like, your views are never really challenged - it circles our thinking and our choices. What you are recommended are things the past you once chose. Or variants of that. You become your past, in a way. And one would think this created individuality. Hyper niche personas, sitting in their own rabbit hole with only a screen to light up their surroundings.

But it only makes us different in the same way. A higher level of conformity.

In Brave New World, “everyone belongs to everyone else.” Sameness is enforced through togetherness, nobody is ever alone. Because it is individuality that creates differences between people. Difference can introduce debate. Debate can turn into conflict and conflict, possibly into a war.

Our version, though, inverts this method but keeps the result: we are hyper-individuals, alone in our apartments, all being smoothed by the same invisible systems.

We believe we belong only to ourselves, yet we still somehow end up belonging to the machine.

Huxley’s world sacrificed the self to keep society stable. Ours sacrifices the self while insisting, the whole time, that you are a sovereign individual with unique taste.

So yes, I believe we’re moving toward Brave New World. But I also believe we’re doing it alone.

Which makes it almost more dystopian, for at least in Huxley’s world, they were numb together.

Our anesthesia is private. It is injected in isolation.

Ok so this ended on a very dark note, which I didn’t really plan on, so I will bring some positivity back into it because we are, after all, a positivized society.

We have a choice, still, even if it feels difficult. Even if our tools and technology makes it increasingly more difficult to resist the easy way out.

What I would recommend is reading Han. Then maybe sit in boredom for a while. When you have an itch to grab your phone. Sit for two more minutes. Feel that itch. For that itch is a symptom of soma withdrawal.

And even feeling that itch is one step in the right direction.