The Problem of Perception

Are we living progress, regress, or are only minutiae changing, while the important things just stay the same?

To give just one example: When it comes to the questionable “discovery” of lifestyle design, most people on this planet just don’t know about it and live their life as if nothing was happening.

But what about the people who know?
While some of us will think about the internet, the opportunities of passive income and outsourcing, location independence and cheap airfares, and about the importance of personal branding and commitment in the 21st century, others will think of government and corporate surveillance structures, exploitation and missing job security, the destruction of nature and an ever-growing egocentrism.

Both views are true.

In a broader context, the question, then, is threefold:
1) How can we leverage the positive developments of our times without underestimating the negative ones?
2) In which areas our perception of the world is so selective and blurred that we cannot really decide upon which developments are the positive ones?
3) How can we be open to other people’s perceptions in a way that doesn’t jeopardize our own integrity?

And a free bonus question: How can we reach out to the majority not knowing about the developments and be part of the solution instead of the problem?

The Idle Musings are short posts of 300 words maximum. They are published on The Friendly Anarchist every other Tuesday. Grab the RSS feed to get them right into your reader.

You can Eat the Whole Cow (and Nine Other Things I learned in Colombia)

From beautiful Caribbean beaches to snow-capped mountains, from the horrors of narco-paramilitarism to the honest friendliness of every normal citizen, from indigenous heritage to Spanish colonial influences to African traditions, Colombia is a country of contrasts. While at first it can make you feel like an autistic person under bombardment of sensations, over time there are some lessons emerging. Here are ten of them.

1. Life is short.
When I came here nine years ago, Colombia was having the highest murder rate in the world. Since then, violence has gone down a bit thanks to a decent military strategy, but was rising again in 2009, due to completely flawed social politics and a gross misunderstanding of the drug trade dynamics. In the 90s and early 2000s, displaced people arrived on a daily basis in the village I was living in, and often had ugly stories to tell.
But it was not only crime and conflict. Car accidents, natural disasters, poverty, and bootleg booze all took their casualties. When I lived here in that year, it was the first time I got in contact with death so closely – and at the same time with people wanting to live life to the fullest, as long as they could.

2. The government doesn’t decide about holidays. The people do.
In an attempt to stimulate internal tourism, most national holidays in Colombia have been moved to the ensuing Monday, creating 3-day weekends for travelers. While this rule at first seemed just stupid to me, in reality it will likely double your free time: On the real holiday, many people just won’t go to work or leave early, and meet in the neighborhood to drink, dance and celebrate. On the weekend, the party continues. Only on the official Monday holiday everybody will relax to be fit for the following 4-day work week.

3. For work, there’s always tomorrow.
Closely related, you don’t generally have to get a job done today, if you can do it tomorrow. While it’s important to meet friends and have a good time now, work generally can be postponed. This is not to say that Colombians are slackers – quite the contrary, many people here have two or even three jobs and work harder than most Europeans I know. But they know when to stop, they have their priorities set, and they have learned not to care too much about the minutiae that make many people around the world go crazy at their workplaces.

4. Rum shouldn’t taste like raisins.
Rum has suffered of bad fame for too many years. Horrible blends are often used to cook or to bake cakes, and only if you really push it, you may prepare a Cuba Libre with a mediocre bottle of Havana Club or even Bacardi. Colombians, in contrast, drink their dark rums pure and often without ice. While the blends here aren’t the best of the world, they certainly are very drinkable, and they opened my mind to taste other brands, like the spectacular Zacapa Centenario from Guatemala. While not a cheap thing to have, good rum is one of my favorite spirits today.

5. Siesta is not sacred, but you can have it anyway.
When I came here, I was expecting every store to shut down at noon and see a lot of people with big hats having their siesta. This, it appears, is a myth. On the other hand, almost nobody will work during the hottest hours of the day. If you want to sleep, you may do so – if not, just hang around for an extensive lunch with friends or colleagues, have some cups of coffee, and continue with work once you feel like it.

6. Tourists suck.
Of course there are many exceptions to this gross generalization, but some forms of tourism can be quite problematic for a country. With every arrogant “gringo” coming here, Colombia’s world-famous hospitality goes down a bit. If the recent trend continues, I fear encountering Colombians being as suspicious of foreigners as most people in Guatemala already are.
So please, please, please, if you come here, treat people with some respect and don’t walk topless into their restaurants hitting on their 15-year old daughters. Don’t think money can buy you everything.

7. Money doesn’t matter.
Talking about money: It doesn’t matter, really. As I wrote recently, I have been able to live a happy life in Colombia (including travels, great food, lots of ice cream and the above-mentioned rum) on a $200 budget.
What I didn’t write in that post is that those were the good times. In 2001, I actually lived on an unvoluntary banana diet for some weeks, because I didn’t have the money to afford anything better. While I would get breakfast and lunch at work, dinner time always led to a mathematical breakdown with fruits being my main currency: If I bought a cheap meal, I would spend the money that could also buy me 30 bananas. 30 bananas were a lot of food. So I opted for the bananas.
While I was happy to leave that phase of my life behind, it also was quite a lesson: I lost fear about starving, because in the end, bananas are cheap and easy to get, and happiness really doesn’t depend all too much on money.

8. You don’t need to speak a language to communicate.
When I arrived here, my Spanish was enough to say my name and ask for the bathroom. So I spent my first time in the country just learning the language and trying to get around. After four or five months, things started to get easier and easier, and when I left after a year, I had learned a new language.
What’s the fun thing about this experience is that I also learned to communicate without using spoken language at all. Hands, feeds, and smiles help a lot, and just by throwing in some words from a small dictionary I always carried around, I was able to have a great time, meet many people, and get to know a lot of new places and things.

9. You can eat the whole cow. (And ants are tastier than you’d expect.)
I’m not a big fan of meat. In Germany, I would eat the random steak, spaghetti bolognese, and brown bread with salami, and that was pretty much it. While I was totally fine with that from time to time, eating animals each and every day never appealed me.
Quite a change to arrive in Colombia, then. Only here did I learn in practice that you don’t just eat the filet of a cow. Brain, tripes, lungs, and kidneys all can be put to good use, and while I sincerely still struggle with finding pleasure in it, I think it’s a good lesson in how to put resources to real use.
I also had some more pleasant surprises on the culinary side, for example when I first tasted fried “culona” ants from the Colombian department of Santander. While having a strange appearance, they make a great snack and got recently on sale in delicacy stores around the world – well-deserved so!

10. Everybody can be your teacher.
From elderly fishermen to presidential candidates, from pious nuns to satanic black metal singers, from leftist guerrilla supporters to right-wing undercover agents from the army, I noticed while living in Colombia that everybody can be your teacher.
Never before did I get access to people from so diverse social backgrounds, but once I did, I started to learn more than I could have imagined. Apart from practicalities and philosophical insights, the most important lesson for me was to be open to the ideas and thoughts of anybody. While I often wouldn’t agree and sometimes even fiercly discuss with the people I met, everybody could teach me at least something on the way. Since then, I will never let pass the opportunity of hearing the thoughts of others and trying to learn from them.

What lessons did you learn while living in another country or when moving to another town? Also, what recipes can you recommend me when it comes to eating “the whole cow”? It would be great to hear from you in the comments or by mail (fabian[at]friendlyanarchist.com)!

Gamblers

While you wring hands over what it all means, we are trying to change the world, build relationships and communities. Are we naive? Possibly. We prefer a world of naive dreamers to cynical observers. […] We are gamblers, believing in the value of risking everything for the sake of our “foolish” dreams and schemes.

Today, instead of musing idly on idle musings, I invite you to visit the Lebenskünstler blog by Randall Szott and read his “Draft of a manifesto written in defense of a group of people that did not ask for my defense, using words they would not use and engaging people they ignore”. It’s less than 300 words long, so it fits well into this series, and if afterwards you’re craving for more, feel free to look around his delightful website or read my (probably way too) long post on deliberate dilettantism from yesterday.

The Idle Musings are short posts of 300 words maximum. They are published on The Friendly Anarchist every other Tuesday. Grab the RSS feed to get them right into your reader.

Deliberately Dilettante

There certainly is a case to be made for experts. When it comes to heart surgery, I absolutely want the doctor to be a specialist, an expert, and to know what he’s doing. I wouldn’t want to have it done by a heart surgery enthusiast that discusses days and nights in online bulletin boards about what scalpel to use for the cut, but doesn’t have the practical skills it takes to get the job done, i.e. my life saved.

On the other hand, not everybody wants to be a heart surgeon. Nor does everybody want to specialize in drinking water treatment or nuclear power plants. And while there definitely exists a justified need for experts in these and some other areas, if everybody in society decided to specialize in just one thing, we would be doomed pretty fast. People would get so involved in their respective fields of expertise that they wouldn’t be able to communicate with each other anymore, resulting in what the Germans call a world of “fachidioten”: Specialists that know more and more about less and less, and thus have difficulties to work in teams that treat larger issues.

So probably, there’s also a case to be made for enthusiasts, amateurs, and dilettantes, and it’s my hypothesis that it’s a great time to be one.

10.000 Hours of Dilettantism & 80% Greatness

The word “dilettantism” comes from the Latin “delectare”, that simply means “to delight”. Originally referring to a lover of the fine arts, a connoisseur, its neutral or even positive meaning nowadays got widely replaced by a deprecative one: The term dilettante is used as as an insult for someone dabbling in an art or field of knowledge outside of his main activities, and implies he’s doing it poorly.

Of course it’s true that you have to put a lot of effort into any given field to become good at it. Widely known is the “10.000-hour rule” presented by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers. Gladwell claims that to excel in something, you have to put the hours in – that is, approximately 10.000 of them. If only after so many hours you become a master in a field, this is truly a strong argument for a world of experts.

Or – isn’t it? If we break it down, 10.000 hours can mean that if you do just one thing for ten hours a day for nearly three years, you’ll become great at it – but you could also put in only two hours a day into five different things and need less than 14 years to become a master in all five. Now, while you’ll get certainly even better in that one thing by doing only that for all 14 years, getting 80% great in many different fields may be an interesting alternative at least to some of us.

While there’s nothing wrong with studying an issue in depth (I did that for over a year with the creation myths of a Colombian indigenous community, becoming at least 1/3 of an expert), the world also needs people who are able to associate different areas of expertise and look at the wider picture. Maybe you’re one of them because the idea of doing one thing (and one thing only!) in your life just seems a bit too boring. Or maybe you’re aiming to protect yourself from falling victim to uselessness in the moment you get sacked from your present job: If you only know about the narrow tasks related to your current position, finding something new in case of dismissal can become difficult. So it’s probably good to widen your knowledge and become a happy amateur in different fields, not caring about the insults that you might have to suffer. But whatever your reason may be to become deliberately dilettante, chances are you fear not so much to be labeled as a one, but to die of hunger because of not knowing how to make a living.

The Dilettantic Blogger (And the Money Question)

Originally, dilettantes weren’t distinguished from professionals and experts by the quality of what they did, but by doing it without pecuniary interest. Dilettantic artists generally were noblemen that just didn’t depend on earning a living with their endeavors – which neither did mean that what they did was bad, nor ruled out the possibility of making some money anyway.

Nowadays, the money issue becomes more pressing. Most of us don’t have any castles to live in without financial problems, and while normal jobs may bore us, a monthly paycheck can be quite attractive. But in recent times some great opportunities opened up for dilettantic bloggers, artists, micro entrepreneurs and career renegades, resulting in a cult of the amateur that some see as an evil thing – while I personally couldn’t be happier with it. (While the naysayers worry about us being stuck in a world of dilettantes, my only advice would be to avoid jerks that call themselves experts while in reality just being … well, jerks. But that’s true for consulting companies all over the planet and certainly not a problem of web 2.0.)

Being a blogger often is a typical dilettantic occupation: We follow our passion and become active just because we want to express and discuss the things that occupy our minds and hearts. Interestingly, many bloggers have managed to convert their passions into hard cash, and this is something that fascinates and motivates many of us even further.

The thing with making money as a blogger of course is that it generally requires a specialization in itself: If you focus on a niche it becomes a lot easier to congregate an audience of potential clients. But the good thing is that you are the person to choose your niche. It can be anything that interests you, even if you’re not (yet) an expert. Also, you can write in more than one niche – ideally on different blogs. You can earn money with blogging itself, or rather use your writings to support your micro business. You can launch several products in several areas, as long as you have the willpower and the time. You don’t have to become a professional blogger or entrepreneur right from the start – or, for that matter, ever – either, as you can take it on while being employed, doing freelance work in other areas, or studying and living at home.

This means that you are free to decide upon your personal approach to pursue and how to integrate dilettantism into your life deliberately: Following the broader approach of 10.000-hours mastership in different fields outlined above would be just one of them. You could also excel in one field – and be a dilettante in some others, like Jacob Burckhardt suggested. Or you could even mix two fields of knowledge and become an expert dilettante in the combination of them.

Life as a Dilettantic Experiment

For me, the most important point of being a dilettante is the great opportunity to experiment without fearing the consequences – other than dying of hunger because of lacking a backup plan, that is.

On deciding to cut a path of dilettantic location-independent lifestyle design, I never know where I’ll be in a year, or even in a month. But at the same time, I am able to work towards my goals “from a whole bunch of angles in a whole bunch of ways” and have a deep trust in that something will hit. (If I end up starving on the road, I’ll let you know in a tweet!)

While it probably isn’t in line with the recommendations of your vocational counselors, this and other dilettantic approaches to life provide a great opportunity to live joyfully, instead of working as a money making machine for some shareholders you don’t really care about.
Especially thanks to recent developments on the web, dilettantes have a big level playing field and can make weird products, texts and artworks no company or gallery would ever back, without making bigger investments. Learning by doing has never been so easy.

As a dilettante, you work with a complete openness of results, like only few professionals do in well-financed lab or office contexts. But while a scientist has many lab rats to experiment with, the thing about life is that we only got one. This often prevents us from trying the things we are interested in, due to perceived danger. I think that taking a dilettantic approach towards it is what allows us to abolish what sociologist Richard Sennett calls “the great modern taboo”: Fear of failure.

On the one hand, a dilettante knows very well that he will suck at anything when he’s just starting out. On the other hand, even ultimate failure in one field won’t be the end of the world, because he always has other areas he likes to engage in, and other things that call his attention. Quite the contrary of the fear-paralyzed society, a dilettante can enjoy failure, because it allows him to refocus, learn something and further develop himself as a person. While he is indeed able to put all his energy into one thing, it’s not as if his life depended on it. Dilettantes are free to try, free to do, and also free to discard a thing if it doesn’t work.

In the end, if you achieve stunning results in an area, that’s great – if not, you’re also fine, as long as you are able to sustain yourself somehow. When Cody McKibben writes about living a great life for little money in Thailand and I ramble about how to have a great time in the Caribbean on a 200 dollar budget, we’re exactly into this field of experimentation that I find to be so valuable.

Because of being open towards whatever may result, inventions, discoveries and ideas created by dilettantes can well bring a positive change not only in one limited area, but in a much broader sphere. In this sense, dilettantes may be the real experts of experimentation. If you have not already tried to live deliberately dilettante, why not give it a shot and dabble into something new today?

How low can you go?

Burning Cash?For the last year or so, I have been living on a monthly budget of 200 dollars or less. If I talk about this to friends living in the US or Europe, they will feel pity for me about having such a bad time.

The thing is, 200 dollars is more than enough, thanks to the generosity of the people around me, and some easy-going frugality. When living in Cartagena, I have a near free room that at the same time is a near free home office. My neighbors pass on their DSL to me via a 20-meter ethernet cable through a hole in their wall, and the best bars in the city are cheap, because you just open them yourself with a bunch of beers and a sunbed at the beach.

Of course I wasn’t able to live like a king. But I still got to have the best coffee in the world, eat a lot of ice cream, meet a lot of beautiful people, and seeing some great new places while traveling around Venezuela, the Amazon region of Brazil and Colombia, the Andes and Central America.

For me, this experiment holds a lesson: It shows me how low I can go. And a chance: It gave me time to think about what I wanted to do with my life and start making it a reality. If you’re up for some change in your life, maybe the next time you’re about to burn some cash, why not skip it and try to go low?

The Idle Musings are short posts of 300 words maximum. They are published on The Friendly Anarchist every other Tuesday. Grab the RSS feed to get them right into your reader.