It started with a Gut feeling

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A couple of years ago, I had a strong gut feeling that something bad was going to happen. Something really bad, and I told my wife that “we have to get out of here”. We had to get away from our nice apartment in the city and settle down in a house in the countryside. That gut feeling should not be dismissed. It has never failed me. Unfortunately, I have never been so right about anything in my whole life. Out here, in our new home – nothing, and I mean NOTHING has changed since 2019. A solid foundation keeps you sane.

There’s this saying that if you boil a frog slowly, it will happily sit down in the kettle until the temperature kills him. Put him in boiling water and he will jump out instantly. The world in late 2021 feels a lot more like boiling water to me. I chose to turn off the mainstream news many years ago. Just check in occasionally with a lot of healing time in nature in between. I know it sounds like a cliché but oh boy does it work… Even though I am extremely active on social media nowadays, I do my best to be a producer instead of a consumer. Consuming is a mental drug with the primary purpose to capture your attention for as long as humanly possible. I look at the role as a producer to publish as much valuable content as I can. Yes, the debate on social media is often horrible. But it is your own choice. As soon as you un-follow all the fear porn and negativity, the experience changes drastically. My feeds are actually quite nice now.

These past two years would have been a lot more challenging to endure in the city. It is all but impossible to disconnect mentally. You are constantly bombarded with impressions. And when you live in the middle of nowhere, every impression is your own choice. Except when Mother Nature gets angry and throws a storm or two your way. But that is also valuable, because it gives you perspective to what is important.

I did one such little “scouting mission” the other day in a thread with a strawman meme about “anti-vaxxers” – whatever that means. According to Merriam-Webster, you are an anti-vaxxer if you are against mandatory vaccinations (they recently changed the definition). Personally, I can’t see how mandatory medical procedures can harmonize with the Nurnberg laws. Which now qualifies me as an anti-vaxxer. Comments such as “fucking idiots”, “assholes”, “low IQ people”, “lock them up” and “fine them” were quite common. Polarization has been on the increase for a very long time, but it seems to have jumped into overdrive now. These nasty comments have an ethnic factor to them as well, at least in Sweden, if you check the data. And we are not talking about the extremist percentile to which the strawman memes might apply. We are talking about millions of people. And no, it doesn’t look much better if you flip the coin either.

We are brewing quite a nasty cocktail here and I am honestly a lot more worried about how our global society has changed in less than two years, than what I am afraid of the disease.