At Home in the World

What would you have done with your life if...?

Ah, the road(s) not taken, the opportunities lost, the talents wasted, the dreams, ah, the dreams: broken, suppressed, stifled.

It is part of popular culture to see our lives that way: we start with infinite possibilities, only to see them progressively pruned as we grow up, all the way to the final pruning of our own head.

This way, invariably, to live is to squander (precious opportunities). What a marvelous anxiety that creates! Are you profiting enough of your life? Are you seizing every moment? Go get them, tiger!

Personally, at 17, I just wanted to be a surfer. I still think of it now...

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#nomadimitritravel

Vote for Hillary just because she is a woman: anti-democratic?

- Isn't it time that the USA had a female president? >>> Absolutely!

- Should I vote for Hillary, then, even though I think there are other, better qualified candidates for president? >>> Absolutely not!

My argument is that voting for presidential elections is not about redressing societal or cultural imbalances & injustices. If it were, we should immediately all vote for a Native American president.

(A few words on the Donald Trump phenomenon as well...)

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#nomadimitritravel

Youth: staying ahead of "The Hunger Games" in old Europe

In the film franchise "The Hunger Games", young people get thrown into a deadly competition with each other that is rigged by invisible & malevolent forces. Caught in a board game whose rules they do not understand, the young have only one choice: to run and adapt as fast as they can.

The films are an apt metaphor for the conundrums of much of Europe's youth: the economic crisis in Europe has been brutal on millennials, with unemployment rates of over 50% in several countries & talk of a lost generation.

In the video, I speak to university students that know that their job opportunities after graduation are bleak. They tell me about their coping strategies & their best friend: Erasmus.

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It's OUR fault social media is so dysfunctional

As is typical, media coverage concentrates on the spectacularly pathological & spicy aspects of social media: porn, bullying, sexting, unauthorized sharing of naked photos etc

Thankfully, most of us will never be victims of any of these abuses.  There are, however, other, more pernicious & underground effects that spare no one on social media.  Research, for example, has just shown that excessive use of social media makes people less happy.  And this is not the fault of Facebook, Zuckerberg et al: it is our fault.

The negative aspects of social media are our fault because they have emerged from our weaknesses and they have established themselves as the only options possible for using social media.  They have become culture and their existence increasingly precludes other, healthier and more imaginative ways of interacting online.

Just as with global warming, we have found ourselves in a mess of our making without a visible culprit or visible solution.  Just as with global warming, the solution can only be a cultural shift.

The problem is really deep and dangerous, because it involves our very identity.  Out of the blue, in less than a decade, an enormous number of people measure their self-worth through their online interactions: I exist because you "like" me.

It is this that drives the obsessive checking for "notifications" from all the myriad sources available.  For they are now all social media, as they all involve our individual existence.  And all of them are welcome: even if we complain, we really just want them to keep coming.  

The connected object beeps/pulses/vibrates and I, the robot, come alive.  If you are not like that, because you are too old or too wise, check the kid sitting next to you.

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#nomadimitritravel

What to do on a rainy travel day

As I dislike crowds, heat and overpricing, I have become a regular off-season traveler. Forget Paris in August: it is a crowded Disneyland of pushy tourists sweating out their despair at never quite actually experiencing what they came here for: Paris.

Instead, I travel in February, under chilly leaden skies, with Parisians vastly outnumbering visitors: the city in its unhurried, romantic, precious splendor.

There are two types of weather determining activity during this sort of traveling: rain and no-rain. When there is no rain, I wander around endlessly, taking in the atmosphere of the city, only stopping briefly for a little coffee & mousse au chocolat under the heated awnings of a sidewalk cafe.

Only when it really starts raining do I seek refuge indoors: museums, galleries, foundations, covered promenades. And the beauty of Parisian interiors is just as refined as that of the city's exterior architecture. The French are confident in their taste and patrimony and don't hesitate to take risks and make bold decorative statements.

In the video, check out the playfulness of the shocking pink staircase leading out to the classical colonnade in the lobby. Fun, delicious and very French!

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#museum  
#paris  

We are always living on the edge

Our society promotes the illusion of the stability and manageability of our lives. Not only death is treated with surprise - ditto for many of life's misfortunes: breakups, firings, diseases, accidents.

It is as if a "normal" life is meant to go smoothly, if not for those pesky occurrences that derail it from its predictable harmony.

I beg to differ. In my view, we are always living on the edge, we are always in the process of recovering from the previous wave while bracing for the next one. Sometimes, I find that accepting this uncertain state of affairs is oddly calming, even soothing...

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Traveling as historical detective work

As much as I love history, I rarely read history books anymore. Instead, I try to figure things out myself while traveling. This kind of historical detective work is very popular with young people, who are frequently (and justifiably) bored with history the way it is normally taught (battle dates, obscure terminology, long names of Kings and generals that are hard to distinguish etc).

- "Why do you think they built this city exactly here and not somewhere else?" I often ask them.
- "By looking at this city's architecture, do you think these people had an insular or a cosmopolitan culture?" is also a question that excites adolescents.

I don't focus on details but on concepts, trends, tendencies and the comparative evolution cultures ("Why do you think the Germans are more open about the shameful parts of their history than the British?")

I wish, when I was a kid, I had been taught history that way.

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Cork: from the bark of this tree to your wine bottle

I had never seen one, though I knew it existed. I stumbled upon it by accident and knew what it was immediately. I had never seen bark like this: the tree could only have been cork.

More accurately, the tree is a type of oak. The cork comes indeed from its bark, harvested sustainably, by scraping. Even a spacy-Californian-tree-hugger type like myself doesn't mind that: bark is dead, much like the nail on your finger: trimming it doesn't hurt anyone.

Take a look at this marvelous tree that keeps your wine fresh and your champagne popping so nicely.


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Chris Poole joins Google (and I am looking forward to being disrupted)

How can you not love the guy who said: "I think most people view anonymity as a natural opposite to something like a Facebook identity. With Plus I think Google really missed this opportunity to really innovate in a way that Facebook hasn’t, and to support this idea that you are many people... We are all different people based on the context where we are faced. We are different people in front of different audiences. Google could have used that opportunity to support this fluid identity."

Chris (“moot”) Poole is the counter-cultural disruptor that founded 4chan, an online community that has been as much loved as reviled. It is also the only online community that has ever made me laugh. To me, hiring Poole is why I still like Google: they are taking a risk - and I hope they go all the way.

There is no doubt that Poole is talented, even brilliant. For over 10 years, an eternity in today's terms, he stayed on top of a community of people with extremely low bullshit tolerance and held their respect (I suspect they are now calling him a sell out). He did that, by staying firm to his set of principles that were clearly articulated and enforced. I respect that immensely.

Google will want him to breathe new life to Google+, though he will probably start with Photos. It is a great idea and I hope that he will not hesitate to alienate and disrupt all of us here (including myself), just as Google itself did when it started.

Since Poole has made the comments above, G+ has moved away from being a Facebook also-run and has embraced anonymity. It has also reversed the platform's integration with other Google products. G+ is now leaner and unshackled and, I hope, ripe for being re-imagined. This is what I hope Poole is here to do, even if it means that his tribe sprays graffiti on my posts and dubs my videos in Klingon.

So here's to Chris Poole and celebrating our "fluid identity" in G+. The new "Collections" feature is, of course, already a successful step in that direction. And my 300 fluid nomadic identities are tugging on my attention span...

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#googleplus  
#4chan  

Skiing in a warming planet: the opportunity

You know by now how much I love nature and the outdoors experience.  You also know how iffy I am about using nature as an adrenaline-playground: 
- ski lifts on virgin slopes
- bungee-jumping on isolated canyons
- kite-surfing ropes tangling on kelp
all of it recorded on Go-Pro, virtualizing the very physicality of natural experience.

Can you still feel the cool mountain breeze on your hair, smell the resin of the pine forest, taste the sea salt on your lips while your blood-pressure explodes from the "ride", amid the beeps of the low-battery indicator?

So it is always with trepidation that I go to ski resorts and always for just one day of taking lifts to the highest peaks (that I cannot access with my randonee climbing skis).

But today, riding the ski lift,  I suddenly thought differently, I had a change of attitude, and it was related to global warming:
-  I thought that bringing people to nature, even on adrenaline/Go-Pro (versus Thoreau) terms, can also be a positive, with the right balance.
-  For it allows for a whole generation to fall in love with nature, with the wild element of the experience.  
-  And that, perhaps, one day, one of those teenagers that's speeding by me, drawn for a few hours from his game console & his lair of USB cables, may dedicate her life, her career to preserve this wildness, to invent cleaner technologies, to stop the countdown of our warming planet.

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