nikita huno

[nikita huno @NikHuno]

"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")

[nikita huno @NikHuno]

@GOD_WAVE_333 true, I mean the whole idea is delegation to save time but at this point correcting their mistakes is costing me more time...

[nikita huno @NikHuno]

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...

[nikita huno @NikHuno]

@TimurNegru Great evening, if I may make a suggestion

[nikita huno @NikHuno]

@TimurNegru One of my favorite Mediterranean villages

[nikita huno @NikHuno]

@TimurNegru Buon appetito

[nikita huno @NikHuno]

@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

[nikita huno @NikHuno]

@Keirashley They like how similar it is to southern France

[nikita huno @NikHuno]

as much as southern europe can be "impractical" and has its downsides, I personally would never live in the US

[nikita huno @NikHuno]

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.

[nikita huno @NikHuno]

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.

[nikita huno @NikHuno]

@nikitabier пусть земля ей будет пухом 🙏🏻

[nikita huno @NikHuno]

summoning the opposite contrarian view @levelsio

[nikita huno @NikHuno]

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.

[nikita huno @NikHuno]

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.

[nikita huno @NikHuno]

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.

[nikita huno @NikHuno]

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.

[nikita huno @NikHuno]

the "deinfluencing" trend where creators tell you what not to buy is fascinating because it's still influencing. the mechanism is identical. someone with a platform is shaping your desires, except now the desire being shaped is the desire to want less. which is still a desire being manufactured by someone with a ring light and a following. actual simplicity doesn't need an audience. but the irony isn't lost on me with making this post.

[nikita huno @NikHuno]

there's a specific feeling in your mid-30s that nobody names. you're old enough to see the patterns in your own life but still young enough to change them. you've made mistakes you can't undo and you've also just barely started. the people around you are having kids or getting divorced or building companies and you can't tell if you're behind or ahead because the map everyone was following turned out to be for a different territory. that's the loneliest feeling. also the most creative one.

[nikita huno @NikHuno]

every period of cultural uncertainty produces a romanticization of the previous era. the victorians romanticized the medieval. the 1970s romanticized the 1950s. we're romanticizing the pre-smartphone world. the pattern tells you more about the present than the past. what we call nostalgia is actually a diagnosis: the psyche marking what it lost. pay attention to what a culture romanticizes and you'll know exactly what it's starving for.

[nikita huno @NikHuno]

the attention economy is a nervous system economy and we should start calling it that. every notification, every scroll, every red badge is a bid for your sympathetic nervous system activation. the business model of the internet is keeping you in low-grade fight-or-flight because that state makes you click, buy, react, share. calm people don't engage. anxious people do. the entire infrastructure is designed to dysregulate you. your exhaustion is a feature.

[nikita huno @NikHuno]

the trad wife aesthetic is growing on social media and the depth psychology angle is fascinating. when women have been told for decades that their worth comes from professional achievement, the shadow response is a fantasy of the opposite extreme. the cottagecore, homestead, baking-in-an-apron image becomes a compensatory fantasy for exhaustion. the psyche reaches for the life it was told to reject. enantiodromia. the swing toward the opposite. nothing wrong with either, just observing.