State of mind

Hey strangers,

it’s been a while. I haven’t posted here for quite some time, but now some thoughts feel like they are leading somewhere. I don’t know yet where exactly, but let’s just try together, shall we?

So, what happened? (quickly checking the date of my last post) Wow! Two years. That’s a lot of time to recap. Basically, what happened is that I got lost in politics. It’s a hell of a drug I can tell you. When you are on it, everything else feels meaningless and everything you do feels important. Because in the end, you do what you do, because you care. You care about other people.

And I had this moment, where I found something cool and powerful. It was a book from a cognitive linguist, who studied how the human brain understands politics and moral. I thought that this knowledge needs to be used to make a difference. Maybe I could make a difference. And other people thought so too. At first my girlfriend read the book as well and she also got hooked. She even wrote a whole online handbook (in German) to share her knowledge publicly. I built a website and published it online. One thing led to another and it took way less time than we thought, until we were pitching our ideas to elected politicians in the German government. And they decided to hire us to do a workshop with their team.

Since then, we were on lots of different political events, networked with all kinds of people, some of our ideas ended up being said in one of the biggest German political talk shows, I learned a lot about macroeconomics working on a campaign at my current employer, Martha started studying cognitive media linguistics, we gave more talks and workshops and generally slowly learned how the political system works. Getting to know the work and organizational structures of the political system was really interesting as well as "the vibe" or culture of the people working in politics.

After all that time looking behind the curtain of the political spectacle, I realized that it’s not for me though. At least not the kind of work I have been doing so far. As I said, politics is like a drug. Once you got hooked, it’s really hard to get off completely. Because in the end, what we are deciding as a society matters. When I grew up, it used to be a time in Germany, where it felt like politics wasn’t important. I know, it sounds super weird in hindsight, but there was this collective idea of "everything is going to be fine anyway" — at least for the somewhat privilegded. Looking back at the hard facts, from an economic perspective working people were definitely better off. Just look at house and rent prices to call out the obvious one.

„But why are you dropping out then?“ you might ask. Mostly, because the kind of work I was involved in was consulting and consulting is not what I want to do anymore. Neither in software development, nor in politics. Working in political communication is also worse, because it’s such a meta skill, that people can easily believe they already know what they are doing. A huge plus working in the software industry is that it’s an undeniable skill. Either you can solve a problem with software or you can’t. Yes, I know, there are unlimited ways of solving problems, some problems shouldn’t even be solved with software, consultancy is always part of being a software developer etc. etc. But at least you rarely have to convince other people that you know what you are talking about and they don’t.

Additionally, I don’t want to base my personal income on the mood of German citizens, like being dependent on contracts or funding, which again depend on who’s in power for the next four years. While the political sphere became less interesting to me, the software industry became more political. Billionaires buying and radically changing social networks, new decentralized plattforms popping up, Europe slowly but steadily taking a stand against big tech… There’s a lot of stuff happening. If I can help getting people off the big plattforms and start investing in their own website again, that would be a huge win already.

I want to build something again, something that lasts, something that works, something other people cannot deny exists. In the past two years I’ve learned again, that I have the skills to build something that convinces and informs people quite quickly. I still need to figure out what exactly that is, but building different things and iterating to make them useful is already what I know and can do. I still love the internet for that. A simple website can reach millions of people. No algorithm, no manupilating engaging AI content or power thirsty billionaires in the way.

And it will start here on my website. I want to publish on the internet again. Not on social media. Not on other plattforms. But right here, on my own little space of the internet.

Thanks for reading this far! The internet is cool, isn’t it? I typed this at 1am in the night on the 30st of December 2024 and thanks to the world wide web you are reading these words right now. That is really cool. It still amazes me to this day.

Cheers, Max