Category: life

Having lived an almost vegan lifestyle for close to 3 years offered me a position to at least talk about it.

While the actual claims about the benefits of Veganism are at least questioned, see here, this is not what I want to talk about.

What I want to talk about is what happens when a trend like Veganism, with its health claims, gets picked up by Big Food.

You had a company that produced cheap cookies for instance. Because of their price point they couldn’t afford real butter, so resorted to using margarine or hydrogenated palm oil.

While even the most optimistic product manager saw that as a clear flaw, suddenly it became an asset. A big green V on the packaging, and voila, your foremost cheapie cookie is no a truly vegan fest.

It’s astounding how much hyper-processed, cheaply produced food get’s rebranded as Vegan today, in the hope to cash in on the health claims. The vegan community is playing accomplice in return of mass-promotion for their agenda. This needs to stop. Vegans, you’re not doing yourself or your lifestyle any favor here. Step up. Expose. And most important of all: don’t buy that junk.

Have you ever been in a situation, where you had to make sure you remembered something? Like “take my passport with me when I leave my home”? 

Usually saying “Don’t forget your passport!” will not work or worse set you up for forgetting. What to do? Luckily I have a nice little procedure for you that works really, really well for me.

When I want to make sure I remember to do something, I mentally link it with an event that I am sure will happen. In our example that would be : “When picking up my bag to leave the house, I will think of my passport, and retrieve it”.

The trick here is to really picture the event, and your passport. The more vivid this picture or short film is, the more effective this procedure will be.

Linking stuff has long been a standard mnemonic trick to remember random items on list. And it works. Your brain is set up to walk along connections. So if you connect picking up my bag with thinking of your passport, your brain will bring up an image of your passport the moment you pick up your bag to leave the house.

Try this with small things, that don’t carry a lot of emotional relevance first, since you will be much more open to experimenting and finding your personal way to implement this much easier when not stressed and result-agnostic.

85{bebb06f271259ca942a7887f5eb25673b4b02ba69cbc6ed6f7a39064dc6657a8} of the time I am not a leader. This ranges from active participant to downright passive consumer. 15{bebb06f271259ca942a7887f5eb25673b4b02ba69cbc6ed6f7a39064dc6657a8} of my time I lead.

I recently looked at the activities I consider myself a leader in, and a clear picture comes to mind. I lead because … I lead! There is just no other way there.  I sometimes try to follow. I just can’t.

Now, we all read a lot about how great it feels to be a leader, how much we should strive for that. Not to follow the pack, to stand out, and so on. But for me this negates a truth I clearly feel. Leading, standing out, is – at least a lot of the time – not comfortable at all. You are alone, you get attacked, ridiculed, belittled, who-do-you-think-you-are’d. And that hurts. Plain and simple.

I am a rather shy person, carry a lot of shame, and hence am not very comfortable when I’m singled out. A lot of the times I wish to just blend in, maybe have my way here and there, but all in all, go with the flow. But in some fields, that’s jsut not possible. It makes me feel so horribly stupid and wrong, that I just have to listen to my own voice and go with that.

Here, I become a leader. Now leading sometimes feels great. The self-respect and sense of self-reliance and souvereignity it entails are hard to beat. They are also hard won.

And that brings me to my point: I guess most leaders are not leaders because they fancy it. They are leaders because the other avenues are not open to them. Leading is dangerous, makes you feel vulnerable and uncomfortable. That is precisely the reason so few people meke good leaders or wish to lead.

But then, who knows, I might just find that these sensations: vulnerability, shame, discomfort are really signs of strength in action. I might just be willing to give it a try.

Although I set this up and edit this blog as very tech-centered and tech-related, from time to time I feel moved to write something about life, our perceptions or our attitudes.

This blog post is one example.

For some time now there has been a lot of talk, especially in psychological, spiritual and self-help circles about the wounded child. The wounded child refers to the part in us, that did not get its need met in childhood, when we were dependent upon others to fulfill them, in a timely and judicious fashion, and so remains stuck at some level of development, often recreating the dysfunctional dynamics later in life.

It’s unanimously agreed that we repeat these patterns so we can grow concious of our past hurt and then move on, thereby healing ourselves and the dynamics, that otherwise get passed down from generation to generation in a family.

Often, the dynamics are seen as logical conclusions, patterns of behaviour that the child had to adopt in order to survive in a dysfunctional family.

Here is where I disagree. Yes, most of us did not – at some point in their childhoods – get their needs met. Yes, many of us had experiences with shameful /shaming mothers or fathers, critiquing parents or simple neglect, in one form or another.

But: the behaviour the child then established is its own choice, it had many options and it chose that one. Now you might say: Yes, but had the parents recognized this, they could have educated the child. Since we assumed that the beaviour was the response to some kind of neglect / critique or shaming, it is safe to assume that the responsible parent did not do so from the consious, self-reflected and loving part in itself and therefore will have a hard time assessing the behaviour as a response.

My point is: today we underestimate how willful, resourceful and active / present children are. My point is not to condone neglect, but for ourselves to see that we were the architects of our behaviour from day one on. Then it becomes easier to own up, and move on, and not get sucked into a circle of victimhood, and bleeding-heart storyline.

There’s been a lot of talk about “portfolio work” in recent years. Meaning that more and more people don’t hold on to a steady job, or have one singular carrer path, but instead have multiple work and revenue streams that they connect to make their livelyhood.

The term portfolio however, implies for me a certain thought-out-ness, a sense of willful diversification and planned broadening of singular points-of-focus.

In my life, at the moment, I pursue various projects,  don’t really count, but I estimate there are 6-8 active projects, and another 4-5 in the pipeline.

Some of these projects interrelate and create synergy, others are completely seperate and just for the sake of it.

I like it that way! I’m not in the game to be the best, richest, most succesful anything. I’m in it for the full width and depth of experiences available.

So I found an analogy that suits my lifestyle, and those of people similar to me, better than portfolio work: tapestry work.

My threads are my projects, my jobs, my family, my lovers, my children, my prayers, my hopes, my fears, my practice. They interweave and crisscross and form something unique and dazzling: my life!

And what a beautiful tapestry it is!