"If there is no price you are the price"
The paradox of being online despite craving the offline.
This is what I'm reflecting on while reading Tommy Dixon's essay "How to end your extremely online era" in my garden in Puglia last Sunday.
Recorded this in one long take. Full video in the comments below.
(Discovered the essay in @MichaelDean_0 anthology "Best Internet Essays of 2025")
@itsolelehmann why not switzerland? COL is high and is not as cool but at least you'd have lower taxes, better entrepreneur infrastrcture/mentality, German language (when they speak it to you lol) and proximity to Germany...
my £90/m claude is doing a much better job at my accounting than my £142/m UK accountant — and it's doing so much more than accounting... things are changing. I probably just need a more basic auditor/accountant that just approves what claude did. eventually not even that...
@itsolelehmann Weren’t you doing Claude code in cloud at some point? I’m travelling now and don’t wanna carry a second laptop so thinking of best setup
I keep meeting americans who moved to southern europe and they all say the same thing: I didn't know life could feel like this. the walking, the two-hour lunch, the fact that nobody asks what you do within the first thirty seconds of meeting you. the american nervous system has been running on cortisol for so long that the absence of urgency feels like a drug. the first month is euphoria. the third month is grief for the years you spent wired.
I've cycled through more hobbies in five years than my grandfather had in his lifetime. film photography, ambient music, ceramics briefly, language learning, field recordings, fiction. he was a mining engineer for all his life. I think the hobby cycling is partly access (youtube teaches everything) and partly avoidance. if you never go deep into one thing you never face the moment where talent stops and character begins. the hobby becomes the escape from mastery.
I keep meeting americans who moved to southern europe and they all say the same thing: I didn't know life could feel like this. the walking, the two-hour lunch, the fact that nobody asks what you do within the first thirty seconds of meeting you. the american nervous system has been running on cortisol for so long that the absence of urgency feels like a drug. the first month is euphoria. the third month is grief for the years you spent wired.
the cabin in the woods fantasy is the hermit archetype trying to surface. everyone I know has some version: the small house, the mountains, no wifi, a stack of books, a fireplace. the fantasy intensifies in proportion to how overstimulated your daily life is. jung would say the hermit is the psyche's demand for introversion when the persona has been extraverting too long. what the cabin represents is permission to stop being available. the image carries more weight than the real estate ever could.
there's a bird here that sings exclusively at dusk. I've been trying to identify it for months. it starts around 8:15pm when the light turns amber and stops exactly when the sky goes dark. I don't know what kind of bird it is and I've decided I don't want to know. some things are better unnamed. the modern impulse to identify, categorize, and google everything is a defense against wonder. I'm practicing leaving some things mysterious.
your best work happens when nobody's watching. the presence of an audience activates the persona, the mask jung described. you start performing competence instead of experiencing discovery. every musician knows this. the practice room version is always more alive than the stage version. I write better at 6am when I've forgotten anyone reads my work. the forgetting is the ingredient.