Why I Don’t Like Time
Time, for me, is a prison. The world would be much better without it.
You can eat every day at 18:00 — sure.
But it’s better to sometimes eat at 17:00, sometimes at 18:00, sometimes at 19:00.
When you should.
Which isn’t necessarily according to the clock every day.
Don’t worry: the sun still rises.
Time is Thematic
When you describe a period of time, not all years carry the same weight.
I would describe time like this: "That was the phase when I was really into fitness. And I was doing well back then."
The center of gravity of time is whatever you were immersed in at that moment — what you were dealing with.
It’s a thematic ribbon that ties together a large or small period.
I’ve also known times when I completely lost myself and lost my way.
The pitfall is thinking of time as a fixed stretch of 365 days, where each year counts equally.
Yes, the sun rises every day — but that’s about all you can say about it.
You know that glimmer in someone’s eyes when they talk about festival seasons, and they say, “Ah, that time, yeah…” — that’s how time really works.
Think of It This Way: If I’m Deeply Struggling with an Idea or Feeling, What Does That Say About Me?
It’s about which part of the body you most identify with.
We were "created" the moment we began to over-identify with the idea we had about ourselves.
In other words: we over-identify with our head and our thoughts,
and under-identify with our feelings.
The danger of over-identifying with ideas is clearly visible in psychiatric disorders.
Imagine you're really struggling with a thought or feeling within yourself — what does that say about you?
How Knowledge Weighs You Down
A beginner’s guide to setting up your brain
By now, most smart people have a decent sense of how the brain works, so here’s a rough but effective strategy.
You can replace individual thoughts with other thoughts.
If you see the brain as billions of different thoughts, all talking to each other, you realize:
Be careful not to overload yourself with knowledge. The more (heavy) knowledge you accumulate, the harder it becomes to maintain an overview.
Imagine I could fill your brain with up-to-date, accurate thoughts in every field—math, physics, biology, language, movement. That wouldn’t necessarily be an advantage. Why? Because it would make it harder to come up with new ideas.
The trick is to balance current knowledge with not knowing.
In plain terms: form opinions on everything without any prior knowledge.
That’s actually how you learn the fastest.
Eventually, you’ll realize that many things only exist in people’s heads—not in the real world.
Take numbers, for example.
They don’t really exist. They’re arbitrary.
Still, we’ve built entire systems around them.
But numbers themselves are just superficial labels—we use them to point at something indirectly. The actual object is always more important.
Back to the brain.
I usually take a few moments each day to swap out individual thoughts.
But be careful: do you only want to replace the unpleasant ones?
Then ask yourself what that says about you.
Feelings like sadness, for example, are important and beautiful—even if they’re not always nice or pleasant.
Personally, I work with very little factual knowledge—so I can rely on intuition as much as possible.
The downside is: in situations that do require facts, you’ll always know less.
But to me, health and feeling matter more than facts. (And those two don’t have to be mutually exclusive.)