I’ve writing a new essay series (book?) for this Substack — coming soon.

And now I’m also launching new podcast as a way to support this coming essay series (book?).

The new podcast is called The Hope Axis. My first guests were Noah Smith and  Katherine Dee — with the third episode coming soon with the great Phil Klay.

The “hope axis” is a recent area of inquiry of mine, and something I find worthy of extensive multidisciplinary discussion:

I posit that the past decade’s cultural standoff between Wokes (past was bad)and Conservatives (past was good) has been replaced by an Autist Culture (future will be good) vs Public Nostalgics (future will be bad) dichotomy. 

In my analysis - having spent the past five years nonstop immersed in realtime idea formation and debate on Interintellect - people’s attitude toward the future is the most important thing to look at in politics today, and only through directly discussing it will we not fall into the culture proxy wars that lead absolutely nowhere. The red line that cuts across party affiliations, based solely on our intuitions about the future, is the hope axis.

With my excellent guest, we’ve been exploring how ideological polarities are changing, what remains in the world to hope and work for, and how Millennials coming into power shift the balance — and what our responsibility as the new leaders is.

Watch episode 1 with the economist Noah Smith:

Noah Smith and I kick off my new podcast series The Hope Axis. We talk about the future, the economy, India, China, and of course America. We look at ways to be excited about what's coming, and what to do about it as individuals.

Watch episode 2 with internet anthropologist Katherine Dee:

The great Katherine Dee (Default Friend) joined me for this lively discussion (debate?): we talked about happiness, free speech, subcultures, why the internet is a good thing, what the kids do on social media these days, digital anthropology, Millennials, Tumblr, wokes, and more!

I hope you will enjoy these first two conversations, and that I’ll see you at an Interintellect event - online or offline - soon!

Please leave your thoughts in the comments below or on YouTube. 

Warmly,

Anna

I have an unhappy habit, I start to want to fight at 1 am or 2 am, at any am that’s one hour before bedtime, my muscles tense up in joy, I feel fresh, strong, strung, ready for war. But there’s no one here with whom to fight, it’s not the time, I tell myself, maybe it will never again be that time when I have to fight, it’s alright, the clean apartment or hotel room, the soft smell of folded clothes, the stacked books, lining up as order. It’s time to lie down, I tell myself, to not move, to sleep.

I’ve wanted to write about fighting for weeks now, but it’s very hard for me to go there. I know for a fact that reincarnation is a myth, but when I was a 16 year old high school student in France, one winter morning our hyperactive PE teacher (aren’t they all?) took us outdoor to do athletics on a frosty football field, at 7:30 am, in gloves, as one does. I picked up the javelin, my grip firm on its handle, and I knew it. I remembered. I remembered my steps as the grass crackled and broke under my shoes, my palm, my fist, my biceps recalled the spear, and I threw it. My body burst into delight at something familiar to someone else, a puppy’s first thrown stick, brought back, that height! The PE teacher gaped at my javelin sticking out of the frozen ground at the far end of the pitch, and asked me if I had ever thrown a javelin in my life, I said no.

I am built for war, and I know it. So are you. And peace too, the gathering. Sitting in love around fires and laughing at stories. And touching and waiting. And growing and eating. I have fought and have been fought with in my life, I have been fought, and so have you. It is war and peace, always, through and through. The great Hungarian poet László Nagy wrote love is something that must be carried across the river held between your teeth. So what have you saved in this life? What was contested when you won? When your muscles tighten at night, what is it that you want back? Have you given up on it, will you ever sleep again? 

I’m stuck with some questions, and I thought I’d line them up like an order, to see what sticks.

Are we made for war or peace

If you brought together two equally skilful groups of debaters tasked with battling out whether it’s wartime or peacetime that’s more “normal”, they’ll likely end up with a tie. Wars are avoided at great effort in order for things to remain normal. For cities to stand and economies to be in balance, for children to grow up and couples to stay together, for the body intact, the faith at half-mast. Humans are BAU dwellers, your debaters might say, we thrive into art and ennui when bored, we read, we philander, it’s delicious.

Then wars break out, and we rediscover nature. The goodness of man, his evil. People talk about a more real state of being, with the masks now off, all the cities and books and symphonies were just wallpaper on the ruins, it turns out, this, this is what we are, the timeless beast. Humans come alive in states of exception, it’s hard to come down from it, some never do.

So which one is it? What are you? A farmer or a fighter? The ease of the workless evening, the readiness of the wrist. The sons taught the polite “Good night!”, the quick punch-back, the letting you go first through the door, the their staying on top. The invention of triggers. I delve into poetry on some nights, and find blood. I read the news of vast destruction, and find literature composed in shelters.

I run a company building places of peaceful gathering like it was an army, we train event hosts in the martial art of peace. For Christmas my Russian friend sent me a picture an artist had made on commission, it’s a woman holding a sword, in tears. My friend subscribed it for me, “Keep weeping, keep fighting”, she’s set to host an event for us now with my favourite Ukrainian poet.

When are you more you? In love? In war? In between?

Do we fight for or against things

If you trace back even just the past few years of your life, you’ll surely happen upon one paradox of peace or another, I myself surely have fought a lot for my current state of peace, and what I fight for today I earned the right to during years seemingly still and uneventful. Then we fight against mediocrity too, non-achievement, dullness — the everyday, every day. Or we get angry and make uneasy peaces with where we stand and what we can do.

I fight my way out of situations I get myself into. Time loops where events repeat every year like school. The same email sent every year, once, the same trip booked again, to the same place. You wonder if these are wholesome life seasons, the Tao, or you’re going around in circles like Winnie the Pooh in the fog. I try to fight my way into knowledge sometimes, into circles that often turn out not to exist once I’m nearer. The greatest positive freedom seems to still call for fighting against things, the privilege of the most effective altruisms seeks to crack the greatest ills. I am fought sometimes by people who don’t even know me, and I’m invited to fight back in their imagination.

Kundera knew about how embarrassing fighting is. In Immortality his Agnes, the reasonable sister, understood the intimacies of war. That it takes two to tango, in a duel your wanting to win is most clear, that you joined, you showed your teeth, your desire. Un désir comme du sang à vos pieds a coulé hors de moi, says one of the men in Koltès’s two-man play where the Dealer and the Client face off in the double-entendre filled Parisian darkness. So Agnes doesn’t confront anyone lest she’d get too close to another, so revealed.

***

It makes sense that it is two sisters in Immortality, one rational, one romantic, through whom the real conflict, war versus peace, unfolds. Most people first encounter love and war in the form of a sibling, whether they were already there when they were born, meeting them in shock, wonder, and jealousy, or would be born after them, eliciting that same response. Two siblings are the original zero sum game, competing for what indeed is a scarce resource, the 24 hours of the mother, in luckier cases alleviated by fathers’ and grandparents’ contribution. Two-child households don’t have the Pentecostal or Hegelian triad, no third party can really dissolve and to absolve, a lot of clashes feel like life and death, indeed at some point they were, we must have fought in humanity’s crib, if not the womb, we were never our brothers’ keepers.

When it comes to our new polarisation in the West, I’m tempted to think an unexplored underlying cause may well be that now the second generation of mostly two-child households has grown up, people who from early childhood have fought ugly for either/or, to whom it’s her or me!, who have no visceral knowledge of forming allegiances, we know only how to appeal, who understand all things through interest and difference.

Doctors in first world countries are told not to deliver serious diagnoses facing you across a desk, one-on-one frontal conversations feel confrontational to monkey-you, they take you on a walk instead, moving two-step in the same direction already feels like resolving, there is progress, step by step, an alignment. There goes all your first date dinners, sensitive work lunches! Humans want a profile, the phalanx row.

As I am writing this, a fight breaks out in the street outside my apartment, the balcony door is open, I can hear everything. A group of teenagers, a girl is yelling, it’s something somebody has said, and I know with near-absolute certainty that the subject of their conflict is insignificant, but it will nevertheless lead to ruptures, friendships will break up, new couples will form, people will move to different places eventually as a result of it, different children will be born than would have otherwise, even if tonight it’s just meaningless shouting.

Sibling wars, whether on Olympus or in suburbia, can become similarly contentless once the dependence on the caregiver eases, a stage on which the parents’ conflict can be replayed by two actors. A breakthrough in my self-therapy these past years was to realise how my own parents, seemingly locked into quasi-parental love/hate with one another, were in fact reliving siblingly frictions in their union, which they then outsourced to their children, and since I’ve known this, I now notice it in many homes, the passed down duels spanning decades which we, in our bloodless lives, can never and should never fight to completion.

But some households do fight. There, there is blood. Like a desire it pools at one’s feet. When there is violence in a family you fast learn there is no appeal, the illusion of justice was just that, that one can flee, or one kills or dies.

What does it mean to “survive”

I watched the news last week and wondered if I were sued after claiming abuse would I remember events from eight years ago so precisely, would I have people from back then whom I could call up, would they agree to sit upon the witness stand for me, one consequence of abuse is that you lose friends, some just don’t enjoy the drama, some side with the other side or are neutral, some you’re disappointed in when they say you should forgive unforgivables. Do all women have an obligation to spin a string of contacts in case some man in the future has anger issues and decides to strike them, to tear your stuff up, to spit on you?

***

When people seek peace, they go via elimination. You get rid of stuff. A job, a spouse, or booze, some other routine. In the freed up space energy gets freed up too, the silence refilled with strength we register as peace.

Yet another paradox of peace is how we all and all we own have survived some wars, life is short and all you’ll one day leave behind is what you have made or saved, every book in here, every picture, every thought even, has made it through the brutal sorting of past conflicts, trials, the near-death experiences of DNA.

With ownership comes conflict, half of Moses’ tablets will tell you. Solomon forced out the truth through threatening to eliminate a child. What’s salvaged can feel so unworthy, you need eternal pyramids from eternities ago to be able to forget what was sacrificed, the flesh for the stone, or entire cities, nations, cultures saved through the many lives lost, for it to seem justified.

I have always fought for freedom at a great expense, first by trying to make do with unbearable ways to live, to carve out my mole’s corridors in them, a subterfuge, the tunnel system under the siege. Then I fought through cutting off, I severed my country and my home, I sheared my hair into the bowl where the money was, I shut my mouth and I never looked back. I surrendered the pleasure of the famous name, the familiar face, the eyes that would meet mine, for the face unhit, the name unshamed, the walking tall even if with my eyes cast down.

There’s so much freedom in owning nothing and owing no one. There lies the safety. To build not possessions but living systems that are nourished and can metabolise. Everything under the sun can take care of itself including you. And when I pray, I pray for my work to be blessed, my independence sustained. And yet I know that accumulation in peacetime is normal, that I will do it too, relations and wealth and reputation and comforts. One develops one’s defence technology even before a city’s built. There are walls to guard off envy around some homes, there are homes built on the go and disassembled, with the cycle of seasons moves the family.

What’s the difference between fighting and abuse

Inter-eras are filled with fighting, status quos are challenged at every scale. The small get an opening to try for a bigger slice, the great claim it’s safer if they get greater. Sportsmanship is on my mind these days, how a fight is fair, the rules of engagement in action.

It’s a challenge for me to tell sometimes what is fair. A source of my uncertainty is how a lot of useful information from the world reaches me in the form of my own reaction, I read so much of the world through my gut reactions, the truth, the joy, the anxiety, whether someone is to be trusted, if a street is safe to walk through. All that literature on becoming more discerning, not trusting the knee jerk, the intuition! I’m teaching myself religiously to listen to my intuition more, I’m always right about people and things in retrospect, I want to train myself to rely on instincts much more, and ahead. Unless something is truly dangerous or violent, I’ll rationalise it away, I’ll think I can make anything work — but I can’t. This is how the wide gap between abuse and fair fighting appears to me too, one a happy, cocky perk in one’s muscles, you can tell a good fight, a new might pulls up the body, you want to participate, the other a cold, cowering pull toward the ground, to curl up, to squeal, to disappear, the ancient curse fallen upon your head, the turning into nothing.

During the year when I was told I was a survivor and what I had taken as a normal way of disciplining me was abuse, the great Judit Wirth, the leader of the Hungarian nonprofit against domestic violence NANE, gave me sessions over Skype, I lived in London; during that year it feels like a virus has attacked your brain making you hellbent on finishing the job, and the other part of your brain is fighting to get rid of it and stay alive. During that year I just cried and cried not understanding why I still lived, agreeing with and feeling guilty about those I had to leave, and she held me up out of goodness and curiosity, told me it wasn’t my fault, that it is alright to be very angry, that it’s not normal to be made to suffer, and I held on to her because I wanted to live and there was no one else to hold on to. Then came a day, after around 18 months, when we talked again about what a victim is, and her words, however right, suddenly no longer struck a chord with me, I was now listening with general interest, and that was all well, I didn’t need care anymore or her crutches, I instantly grew obsessed with social contracts and Scanlon, and cooperation theory, my own responsibility when going into action, and the rules of any deal, I rethought my whole life based on that and made new plans, and I tried never to look at any scene again like a victim, that was only needed when I was one but didn’t know, and I remain for this reason sceptical of things like trigger warnings, and handing out medicine to the healthy.

When I was around eight, they forgot to put sunscreen on me for weeks out in the African sun, I got so sunburnt that my shoulders became a hard, consecutive scar like two epaulettes, I’m still left with freckles there. After those calls with Wirth I wrote my last Hungarian poem, rephrasing Paul Celan, and published it, about how I was beaten across those scars during a formal dinner, up at the main table with an entire film crew and all my friends watching, I recalled the pain and how no one came to stop it or to help me, the social hierarchy was stronger than to save a child. I got in trouble, I later found out, for having published that, cruel me. During that year I learned that I love to fight, that it’s not a fight when you’re a child, or if you’re an adult but much smaller, if you’re in some way exposed, it is not a fight when the goal is to shut you up; I love a fight, I was a Girl Scout, I was an athlete all through my teens, I’m here for the scuffle. But it turns out it’s not a fight when the opponent seeks for it to be your last, it’s something I’m still learning, I must admit, so much of it is ungraspable to me through my instincts, so much of it lies outside my intuition, shut off from any internal sense of balance or peace. During that year I learned one must not stop at empathy even when that seems like their best hope, empathy is just someone’s self-pity pasted upon your example, but to demand real help, fighting for you, action. I learned that everything that had happened to me can be chewed and ingested into literature, an edible, it’s all mine now, and it was all worth it. 

Years ago, when I last saw my father, I told him about my nervous breakdown to make my case, he scoffed, repeated my words back to me in my voice, and went on to mock me for ten minutes. He then cut himself with something, and blood started dripping from his lip onto the white tablecloth of the restaurant. 

Everything that I write is true. A hard thing for me about writing is how it calls for a certain narcissism, for standing up and saying, I’ve got this, I know this – not how I normally spend my days, believe me, I’m more on the “people are crazy and I have no idea” team. But I do know that I do know some things, and they might be worth saying. I started Inter-Era because I tend to have two opinions about each important thing, there is an internal argument, a hesitation. So I see this series of essays as a scale, each question I’m drawn to has two pans, and I’ll see which side ends up heavier once I have filled in all of my queries, the real weights will reveal themselves and maybe then I can decide.

How can kindness kill

Last night, perhaps because I was already preparing to write this part of the piece, I reunited in a dream with my Budapest ex-partner, pushed him down on a bed with such authority as if at any point we’d done this in the past ten years, I wanted him more than ever in our real life, a kind of sum, then I saw myself walk away in agitation on Budapest’s streets only to realise I’d left my phone and stuff at his place; I turned around but his part of town was now under a full blackout, in the darkness I could not find my way back.

I spent the weekend planning to write about him as an experiment of mine gone wrong, my big bad bet on the absence of fight. When I was 25, I entered my longest relationship, and swore to myself I’d do everything just right. There would be no screaming, annihilating, object-throwing, name-calling, no one would call me a rat, a cum, or evil, like at home. We’d go full Kantian, vowed I, I’d be an adult woman, rational, intelligent, I’d clear up every misunderstanding over white linen and china, a voice mustn’t be raised here unless in pleasure. And so we lived like that and nearly went insane.

I’d sit at my kitchen table tapping on my laptop and I wouldn’t fight. He snapped at me at home and shushed me in public, and I wouldn’t fight. I made food, I put on garters, made conversation with his grandma, and wouldn’t fight. He’d imitate my voice in mockery, sigh helplessly, we both got fat, and I wouldn’t fight. I looked at the good things, the care, the beauty, and I didn’t fight. I’d joke to my friends that I was so panicked when I finally resurfaced from the university library where I had been hiding, and realised I hadn’t partied at all, that the logical thing to me seemed to be to try and become a groupie and make up for all that lost time, only to soon conclude that I’m boring, I’m monogamous to the bone, and end up loving exclusively well-known alcoholics.

I was like Mia Farrow in Husbands and Wives, I thought, impossible to argue with, impossible to leave, a smooth boa constrictor creeping with reason, curling her terrible spine, and there’s nothing he can do because he cannot fight me, and I want to help but I don’t know what to do either because to me the alternative is apocalypse. And so I’m so kind and affable that he always almost explodes, my undulating philosophical sentences, my forgiveness, the despot with her teeth sunk into his neck! The man wriggles in my grip like a spear, until I throw him, I must have done this too before, the ejection.

The scales won’t even out alone, the balance between war and forced peace, between setting it all on fire and suppressing the fair concern. When I was young, I was told I wasn’t mysterious, I am like my mother, my father told me, we are not fuckable. I spent my childhood smiling in family photos in tabloid magazines. Now that I am older, I see younger women acting all mysterious, it can’t be real, when nothing has ever happened to you, where’s the mystery. Only adults can have secrets, and you really don’t want to know them.

We stayed together because of the music, really, I was managing a rock band, he was in one. There’s a lot of anger in that music, it’s a good fight. The strength of the crowd’s crushing, the volume of the stage, the spit of singing, the elbows poking, my cold sweaty hair stuck to my hot bare back, and thus we lived back then raging into the night. And this sublimating of the fight did work for a few years but that was all, and I miss the wildness of that phase, the staying up till dawn, the speeding down highways, the packing up amplifiers in my stilettos. But with that trance would come the censors too, the lack of true two-way conversation, the sly smile. And so my dream goes black when I’d try to return there.

Can we keep peace without violence

When in late 2016 I started my first startup, which then morphed into a half-built AI-mediated chat app, which then morphed into the patient conversation spaces that is today, fully built, Interintellect, we looked at language complexity in research, and how the simpler the sentence, the more likely there would be a fight.

When you’re stressed and want something real fast you don’t waste the time explaining, a mother chasing her kid on a scooter will simply yell “STOP!” when the child reaches the cars. On the other end of the spectrum would be a long day of hiking, with friends chatting away with no time pressure or agenda. While trying to build the app, we explored how to intervene when the lines got short, when the machine gun fire of messages began. At Interintellect we simply provide more time, for curtness to re-extend into kindness with no constraints.

We hold up our peace with strict, repeated rules. Interintellect — which is at its core art, built with tech, looking like a nonprofit — works like a production apparatus, the idea being that safe and regular acts invite detente, there is nothing unpredictable about the space itself, the ritual environment is reborn with each day, the threshold through which you step re-forms for every entry. Then, in that fixed layout and familiar setup, the new idea, the deep relationship, the great insight will emerge, while outside our metaphorical guards watch over the literal peace within. The walls stand firm, you can even lean against them and rest.

***

People think that peaceful gardens are cultivated by angelic gardeners, not the tight-gripped sawer, the sharp-eyed weeder, the tireless waterer. A paradox of peace and war is in the walls, that inside you want to be allowed to forget that the outside world will never, can never, be safe.

Our homes are predictable capsules built on primordial chaos, you want to be able to close the door, and learn and invent and love and sleep in peace. War cries are “STOP!” or “CHARGE!”, never long undulating sentences that build kinship. Walls gift one with time, and are worth defending at all costs.

There is a freedom and an emptiness won through elimination. If I listened to my intuition it would almost always suggest elimination: separation, cleaning up, and flight. It must be cowardice that propels me not to fight. I stop the elimination and tell myself I am too harsh, I’ll make it work, I always try to make it work, I’m a wartime CEO, an action hero of making do, the far-flung spear, the disappointing child.

The ancestor who grabbed his spear and approached the rustling bush, with a killer or a dinner concealed moving in it. We’re here because a few of them weren’t wrong, and enough fools died, and enough fools ran, and some of us just freeze into the ground all unsure.

Some of us calm lions, we have the experience, we deflate, the devil’s know-how learned the ugly way. The roar’s hot breath, your soothing hands, you survive. Your own roar stuck in throats that don’t feel your own. When I’m angry I often gag, moral outrage makes me physically nauseated, a book can even, Coetzee, Michel Faber, Günter Grass. I grew up to end up feeling so filled up, my oesophagus revolts, I have had too much, there’s nothing more to swallow, I protest with my tongue stuck out. On psychedelics I can see my whole gastro-intestinal tract aglow, the muscled tube that connects my plantlike up and down and fights to rid me of the poison of the words I’ve downed, that messed up my tolerance limit for good. And when it’s 1 am or 2 am in this silence, the spotless apartment, the cut flowers’ fragrance make me stand so strong, and I want to fight for futures that are good. The hand that soothed and no one left to harm.

I was in New York City, in that thick air that seemed to be moving, in a heatwave that’s too much for someone like me. My European toes froze in the climatised cubes that I’d inhabit, the Airbnbs of dubious cleanliness, friends’ apartments. There was someone else there too, much to see with him, not much to talk about, so I’d dash into fridge-like bookshops, in Williamsburg, in Manhattan, buying at prices I’d laugh at on Amazon, and at last grabbed Zena Hitz’s Lost in Thought, a quietly riotous manifesto of withdrawal, and curled up with it on a sweaty sofa, in an ice cold unit, overlooking Brooklyn.

Books about being alone make you feel less alone, one elegant curve-ball of human creation. Some books you’ll read thinking you’ve waited your whole life just to read them, or to write them even, a war that’s so delicious to be defeated at. I was turning Zena’s pages feeling strongly that I had to go, that there’s an art to pilgrimage no one writes about now, that I have talent at that art, if at nothing else in life, in the days of constant conversation no one wants to own a voice in the wilderness that’s crying, but I have it, thought then I, isn’t every good book trying to say the unsayable.

I speak much less these days than I used to, it seems like when finally given the chance I built a life for myself with long, luxurious stretches of silence. When I was small, I was so quick to please that my parents joked I had to be watched lest I’d walk away with strangers in the street, in my self-hurting years I wondered if it was really wishful thinking, so much had I been I told I was “too much”, too talkative, too annoying, too extroverted, a problem they were forced to deal with at great sacrifice. And that was what I had believed, and lived my bookish, brooding, dictionary-bound life feeling too loquacious, too provocative, someone who demanded much effort from others, someone who needed to be grateful for being put up with. The ‘90s were a sociable era in which I felt helplessly lonely, which somehow didn’t affect my sociable self-image at all. I was told at a young age that I was acting entitled, so I learned to ask for nothing from people, I work every day these days to help people never to have to feel that.

I’m writing this down because I realise not one person I’ve ever spoken to would identify as a true extrovert, every one of you speaking to me seems to feel pushed outside of what to you feels right, it makes me wonder if there’s something to being collectively misdiagnosed, mis-dichotomised, that wanting attention or love doesn’t make one an extrovert, that self-assessed psychology tests gather old tribal views more than anything else, that we’re en masse, incorrigibly mistaken about what kind of solitude we really desire, from whom, and when. 

I think it was Alain de Botton who said your five closest friends when combined know you better than you know yourself, their characterisation of you is the most correct one you can ever get. In the intro piece of this newsletter I wrote about the difference between wanting privacy versus wanting control over what is private, and now I’m thinking whether what we see as the extra/introverted binary is only a function of that, people with largely similar sensitivities, all of us, wanting more or less control over whom we’re with, for how long, and when. What if these received categories are not facts in fact but states, states as in physics, endlessly changeable, more “estar” than “ser”, independent of the human condition? As you know, I like to bring up the screenwriting rule that every scene in a film has to either move the action forward or else reveal character, revealing character is also basically about the action in that it will help the viewer in a later scene accept a decision being made by that person, so maybe our self-testing mania, the MBTIs, the astro-charts, the Big Fives, is hoped to serve a similar purpose, to help us in later scenes in our lives understand our very own actions. Is my being an ENTJ some kind of epistemological insurance? Is my moon in the 11th house a pre-packaged excuse? 

I’m sitting here remembering the grandparents that first raised me, how sure I was of their love, how little conversation there was needed. My grandfather getting dressed, what I now think were bullet-scars on his torso, that he came back from where they took him, and I felt safe. My grandmother’s silk scarves tied around my head, the only way I could imitate having the long hair I wanted, dancing to my mother’s pop songs in the living room, a kind of connection, having not much to say. It was when they died that I realised I could learn to be eloquent, I remember being shouted at for hours, the things that were being thrown, the bystanders never intervening, and the first time I raised my head and spoke up in a coherent beautiful sentence, the flash of respect that that got me, that it halted the aggression sometimes. It was only later that my speech became a problem, when my success had made the terror much worse, when you shut up so that you don’t get too hurt, we’ll talk about that, I promise, later. To this day, I remain drawn to men who don’t speak much, who don’t try to explain the inexplicable.

***

It’s not fair to write about people behind their backs, I know. For a long time, I couldn’t. When I was 19 and my book of poetry was published, I got into trouble at home, it’s not fair to make your famed family look bad. My youth poems were innocent and depressive, I had no idea what I was going through and why I wasn’t happy, the few people who knew how I grew up seemed so sorry for me it was bordering on contempt, those who didn’t, envied me and wouldn’t help. So I never spoke about any of that ever, apart from one poem in 2015, or 2016, my last Hungarian one.

I used to seem to attract people with writer’s block, men who’d written a book five to ten years back, Millennials that wooed me with PornHub-honed poises, asking me anxiously if I really wanted them, the consolations that were required of me, you’d be surprised how many years of girls a book gets you, the discerning women full of awe at readings, the men spread out like Christ, waiting to be taken. So I never said anything about how writing made me feel, that to me it’s a deep, dynamic pleasure like dancing, and I never did expect to be seriously read. Such a long time it takes to make people accept that one is not motherly, and I think too much talking only makes it longer.

There might be something to being 38, and feeling there’s less to lose, I’m not trying to please much these days, not walking away with strangers. But in the past three years I simply could not write, even a business memo took me a bunch of time, the startup founder is a new identity of sorts, for a while I had no idea who in me could speak. When I talk to you, it seems there’s a triad of common needs, the permission, the urge, and the identity, so as with which to write.

***

Then, of course, there are those who don’t talk to you. Humans feel so weaponless when that happens. An ill of population growth, I’d venture, surely when we lived 30 people to a group of caves casual rupture was nearly impossible, or at least not outside a ritual structure, when you had no choice with whom you live and where, there were, I imagine, ways to resolve conflict. 

In the you can walk away era we do walk away, in the Inter-Era we expect the etiquette to change. I don’t think fundamentals can change, we fall back into the past at every curb, anger and ambition make you fight so you don’t lose much, you fall in love with long-gone times, want to rebuild Eden, plenty of fish in the sea and you search for a soulmate everywhere, fill out the OKCupid test to find someone who thinks the same as what you think, you don’t marry a person you grew up with who actually thinks and feels the same as you do but expect to find someone just like them among four billion strangers. Aren't we funny that way, always just a little bit bigamous, thinking back, thinking ahead at the same time. And I don’t think in the Inter-Era it’s the diploma disparity that makes women not to want to marry, the fact is that for women marriage sucks unless it’s with someone really great, I think it’s that you can give your own self a pretty good life as a woman, so the standard’s higher. When I was younger and kept falling for rock stars and war correspondents, I’d pray someone would come and “liberate” me, these days I look around and wonder, liberate me from what? And yet I don’t think anything tops a good partnership, I talk to people and they seem to be looking for words too, they want a shared solitude, a form of sociable control, something that just yet doesn’t have a name.

When I was 11, I decided to become a monk when I grew up, I converted to Catholicism, I went to talk to those who lived behind walls, wrote songs about it, recruited two friends to form a new order with me. This went on until the summer of 1997 when I fell hysterically and very loyally in love with Leonardo DiCaprio, decided we’d surely get married, then two days later got my first period, in what might seem like a correlation. As all this happened in ornithology camp where my roommate learned on a pimpled boy how to give love bites, we still laugh at the human binaries with old friends, and the fact that we saw exactly zero bird all year.

I’ve become all of the things that I wanted to back in that decade, a princess, a monk, a war general, I sit with this laptop strategising on money, I sit and I order a pink lace bolero, I sit in the silence and fall back into the past, because everything that you can say reminds me of something, I go to a concert and look at the ageing pianist, the Beethoven reminds me of a boy who played so well, see the lines of heads with their minds opening to music, their own memory reels rolling along the notes like my own, and this one head is mine, this particular consciousness, its edges fuzzy, its arbitrariness to me a wonder.

It is my view that every man’s a sage, we seem to prefer our own company, if I observe what I really do, it seems it’s only wanderlust that makes me leave my shell, or, sometimes, just lust, the travelling for business and pleasure, I run the reconnect program with limited control, then return, then recurl, to the start. What is there to say about our planetary orbits when I haven’t even decided if they’re voluntary?

We seek mentors so we don’t have to talk so much, so we don’t have to be so publicly wrong, pointing to films and books and others’ deeds to illustrate our meaning, a lower risk experiment, that’s clear. The Inter-Era isn’t kind to mentees. The matching algorithm seems to me off. With life paths so zigzaggy who can lead you. A pantheon of cherry-picked masters feels like cheating. When no one feels in control, whoever can save you?

Living partly on the internet like you do, I’ve thought a lot recently about strange new forms of loneliness. The great Aella tweeting about her stalkers, the emerging types of role models we don’t yet have status for, famous but not wealthy enough to protect themselves, the unique talents destined to shine as a standalone, not there for us to follow, the neurodivergent prophetesses with some next-level pure goodness, and I think of Remedios the Beauty, and IB Singer’s Rechele, and of Lila. Of Alt Atlantis and of Cancelled Country. The Multiverse’s reward and penalty circles seem to be the same. The women who didn’t grow out of the binary, and still reside in danger. The solitudes that still don’t have a name.

When I first started writing, my father handed me over to a friend of his, I was 17 and he was old, he took me into a forest to talk about my poems, then emailed me that he wanted to talk more, and I replied, very politely, that creatively it would be better for me if we didn’t, and he never spoke to me ever again even though I went to the faculty where he was teaching for five years, and I’d write poetry after that without a mentor. 

I live as a hermit these days, you could say that, it’s more common than many would think. And I sometimes ponder if hermits can be democrats. One is never a crowd, and so maybe Arendt’s right, withdrawal when done wrong, without self-knowledge, can lead to dark ideas, it might also be good for fast action during fast change, and the Inter-Era is that kind of chaos, a small part of my Twitter thinks what the world needs is more despots, CEOs to manage us through the crisis, they forget that CEOs are their own very great limits, in the sense that Churchill and FDR weren’t democrats, this might have historical precedence, but really what the Inter-Era can do to create more swiftness is extend who has a say in what, if just like your childhood love nation-level group-think is a thing of the past, then let’s find alignment on a wider plane now, if the outcomes are global maybe the votes should be as well. 

Think how many things seemed like sci-fi when you were younger. Era-gaps are times for surprising ourselves.

***

Self-knowledge is contagious, the eagerness with which we want to get infected, nothing is as attractive as someone who knows a lot about you, the gossip, the rake, the wiseman, we want to reveal character. 

I know I want fewer things this year, 2022 to me is about hiding, by November of last year it had been enough for me, enough of the socialite-ing, you look for more outspoken spaces, a distillation of text. When I was broke every decision was an emotional decision, the best description of money I’ve ever read is that money shortens the time between problem and solution, when I was a penniless immigrant I always had to negotiate, to form alliances, to politicise, nothing went fast or smoothly, at every turn someone got hurt. Making something people want, something that makes money, frees me from giving parts of my soul to where I don’t want to, and it has been the most healing experience of my life. People think the big cities, London, New York, exert freedom, but there is enslavement there, too, and not just the poverty loop, the costly appearances, it’s not only the young and the hopeful who arrive there, every year as if deployed by rota, the big cities are also filled with personal refugees, people who had to flee, who can’t live anywhere else, like I was, bringing with them their opaque pain of the displaced. I learned a lot about myself cohabiting with some of them, and still today nothing makes me more mad than not being able to choose or reject companions, the freedom to choose one’s company as the great human right, the pickiness with which to choose whom you love as your last freedom, I felt it even with my classmates when I was in school, that the closeness of months of birth, and of postcodes, was not enough as a basis for association. You want to be with people for the same qualities as what one day might make you leave them, you move to cities for the same reason as what then makes you move out, I moved looking for better forms of being alone, to build a life where everyone I choose to see is a mensch, to talk only when I deem the words to matter, and to whom I want. To make the soul much freer in the service of people, unrattled by noise of the outside world’s choosing. There’s a silence which makes all the good things grow. 

I’m writing this down because I feel I need to be more honest with you, if you’re legible then I must be legible too, to claim author-ity even when I thought I’d long let that one go, one day you wake up less interested in what others have to say about you, the words dislocate from the sentences, stripped down to the stem. Like the distance between your atoms there’s an emptiness that whistles through every morpheme you think you put together, and to me in that wobbliness, that most uncertain knowledge, is where real conversations can begin to unfold.

The hermits sit, lost in Lost in Thought, looking out windows over cities and rivers, they’re knocking at the keys, there is no other sound, the scratching at the codices of the day. I wait for us to call when we’re ready.

I know that, technically, whatever “things” may be they’re always changing. Life’s a running river, ideas are born, loves die, children grow, and we grow old. But if I use my self, my perception, my body, as a barometer of sorts, if I push them outward like I stood and felt things shaking on that night of the fire, then I seem to know, and I hear it from you, and from everyone that comes to speak to me, that we’ve entered a major shift. You’re looking to verbalise a knot in your stomach, a tremble under our feet. Because sure, there’s always some change going on, we ourselves are endless processes, but no, it’s not every day that eras end, it’s not always that we’re waiting for a beginning. Not every age group governs through a reboot. An era is a home of sorts, and we’re becoming homeless. 

I keep telling people we’re in an interregnum, that I too am in a crisis, within a crisis, because of a crisis, that two months ago, in February, what you knew “things” to be was overnight over, and I hope they can tell that I had studied Latin, that I have a hunch, that I am astute, but beyond the vanity and the self-pity, beyond the localised paranoia, and the feelings of smallness and of linguistic failures, I know this to be true, that my life which began at the end of 1983 will be spent mostly in a transitory era, it will run into the unknown, and so will yours, and it has become clear now, to my adult mind, now that my generation has become the adults in the room, with no one to turn to, with nothing to learn from but the present, that the gaps between eras you read about in history books are real, and that for better or worse we’re currently in a big one, and that our responsibility has become very serious. 

And so I decided to sit down, at night when I have some time, to write regularly about change, or Change, about the crisis of words and bodies, and shocks and generations, about our sins and our spines, and of loves dying, and of children leaving, and the will to live, wait, and hold together that remains so strong. I’m an aesthete and dramaturg, I run a culture startup, I know only what I know. But I go out and poke, I listen, and so this is me sharing with you whatever I find.

*

In this new publication, I will mainly talk about ten things. I have a personal stake in and many priors about each of them, I will own up to my biases and try to work through them. 

The main reason why I decided to launch Inter-Era is so I can begin to understand. We talk about “fog of war”, but the “fog of change” is just as disorienting. Amid political, economic, or public health upheavals our stress response makes us forgetful short-termists, we rush, we amass, we eliminate too quickly, we flake out, we withdraw. Absolutely no one likes to change. We pour innumerable dollars each year into “improving” our lives relationally, physically, financially, intellectually, but deep, elemental change causes us fear, it tends to be a product of fleeing, or mourning, or divorce, rarely ever good news. No one wants to learn themselves all over again, from the ground up, post-disaster, no one wants to have to rewrite their narrative. So when inside a big shift, we freeze in a gold-fish stare, we hope to wait out what we pray is a brief storm, and then go back to business as usual. 

In the forever-present of the fog of change it’s hard to spot nuance, hard to see the chain of chapters in which the story really unfolds. So I’ll write here, around once a week, to try and click some puzzles together, to outline what does matter, to calm my mind. Leave me a comment if you feel I’ve missed something.

*

Ten areas of focus – and the why:

1. Authority: City vs Field

We’d been hearing about an authority crisis for as long as I can remember but even the darkest days of expert-distrust during the COVID-19 pandemic didn’t conjure such a hierarchical nihilism as the start of the Ukraine War. 

Authority has a strong vertical axis: you need time for it to build up. This is true individually: you either need the moral luck to be able to prove yourself and then you stay consistent in time, or you need to get older, accumulate knowledge, grow into your respectfulness. And it is true communally: in order for real authority to be established, humans had to settle down, invent literacy, erect ziggurats, and to last. In a fast-changing situation, authority is replaced by assessment, you look at sources on the ground and those who can synthesise what the sources are saying, you pull the information together yourself, you trust your own judgement more than before. We talk about atomisation through technology, in society, but there is no greater atomisation than this. 

There is also the question of acceptance. Richard Sennett elaborates on Hegel saying humans accept authority because it comes with attention, as with a strict parent (see Lakoff et al.) we learn to be happy to sacrifice some autonomy in exchange for the leader’s love. This means that when leaders are busy, the indifference becomes mutual. Hierarchies also contain a moral arc: we look up to authority that we feel was won within a system we see as legitimate. If we think our classmates are scheming jerks, their alpha won’t be a beacon of respect in our eyes; look at the people who raised him/her within their ranks! If we think our election was rigged, its outcome will be meaningless. But we too exist within one hierarchy or another, and so scepticism about the whole spiel fuzzies our life plans. Read about the dilemmas the intelligentsia faced during the East Bloc decades, the terrible choices of success vs hunger in a system that didn’t even pretend to be fair or transparent about its values or its rules for advancement. Listen to your friends listing their unanswered questions about their town or their workplace. See if you can spot the similarities.

As I said, I’m far from neutral about any of the ten topics I plan to cover, for me personally the Ukraine War did kick off six weeks of profound authority crisis, and I, really for the first time in my life, felt absolutely leaderless, even role-model-less, while some older than me pragmatism popped up as an inner voice, that OK, nevertheless, all that belief in ordained order was really just an extra coating over the basic facts of life, let’s survive. You sell things, diversify your assets, and abstain from judgement, or at least let your yes be yes and your no be no, you watch other people’s actions very carefully, now their old quarrels seem so beside the point, no one knows what they’re doing, I disagree, we’re back in some older than history time which means we know very well what we’re doing, all of us, and that’s a kind of equality only an extended present can allow. I’ll write about this new flat system of respect to find out how it works, and what it means.  

2. Life as Art: Fiction vs Nonfiction, Onstage vs Offstage, Public vs Private

The few of you who read my earlier pieces (especially this and this) know that I grew up in show business and have a lot to say about the proscenium and what goes on behind the curtain, both literally and metaphorically, and not just good stuff. Most importantly to us now, these binaries, in my time-tested opinion, only really exist in dialectic, there’s no stage without backstage, no private without public, no performer without an audience. No you without me, in order for you to be able to live your life and sleep soundly, knowing where one ends and the other begins is a useful source of certainty. 

I’ll quickly resist the urge to apologise for going all Mitteleuropa on you, for getting all Continental, and continue. Yes, as you can read in the established newspapers, and in my investment decks, the internet and especially social media have changed the public square and fragmented some communities while creating many others. The 19th-20th century content machinery of the media, in which there were those who wrote the news and everyone else could consume it or become news themselves, is over. We all have unlimited access to knowledge online, and almost unlimited access to means of creation and monetisation through which to participate. (Companies like mine attempt to add the missing layer, curation based on good ethics.)

I used to joke to friends when such joking was still possible that humans might not be as attached to their privacy as the 2016-2017 social media scandals would have you think. We spent almost all of our history performing all of our life functions and experiencing all of our life events in close proximity to each another. If we can believe James Burke, even solitary reading and thinking only really became a thing with the invention of the fireplace, in the 1300s. I like to say what people want is not privacy but control: to know what photo, text, personal object is shared where, to not be caught surprised. It is now that I realise what I intuited with my emphasis on control was a need for the binary mentioned in this section’s title, what we want is to understand what the stage is and what it is not, what public is, what is not. Even if “my place”, where I’m left in peace, is only a branch on a tree in front of our tribe’s cave, I don’t want to find other people sitting on it when I wake up. What we bemoan about social media is really the destruction of the binary, the control dividing public and private, for which we all, posting online, breaking the wall, are personally responsible. 

Traditional knowledge brokers try to hold up boundaries. Every self-respecting bookstore has a separate fiction and nonfiction section. Looking at the books, I often feel the distinction is contrived. Sure, a lie about the past or the present is plain falsehood, but what about the moments that come after this? Don’t we all weave our lives more or less like artists, the threads of our thoughts, our tastes, ambitions, fears, and preferences flowering into actions that were untrue mere moments ago? My native tongue, Hungarian, calls a bonvivant an “életművész”, a life-artist, our lives as a Gesamtkunstwerk, why not. What social media really did was to give both props and an audience for this next-moment-creation, at a scale we probably hadn’t seen since we fought over tree branches in our ancient home, where everybody knew everybody. If right now everybody’s online, and to juxtapose my Twitter pal Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, online everybody lies, that means we all lie ourselves ahead into existence, at least partly publicly, and we’re succeeding at it, and we love it.

And so I think people mix up the causal structure of why disinformation is such a tough problem. It’s not that a proliferation of untruths leads us to question reality and order, on the contrary, it’s that with the deep empowerment we gained through the internet and especially on social media, our own experiences of life-creation-as-fiction have already changed our epistemological relationship with truth. And if we, individually and as a community, are unsure how much of what we say is true, charges of something outside of us being “untrue” will also be very hazy epistemologically. When both the audience and the performer are at least at times dishonest, we need new epistemological faculties to test for public truth, we need a new binary. 

3. Self-Tooling: Utility and Productivity

This is a tricky one because when one speaks up to criticise the utility tyranny, or productivity porn, that characterises the year 2022, and the accompanying mostly meaningless mindfulness movement which, to return to the dialectic, only ratifies and reinforces the neuroses of overwork culture, one risks coming across as lazy.

I am very lazy. Like all lazy people, I work a lot. I know if I stop I’ll just laze my ass around the apartment, flip into books, and think big thoughts. Who wants that. To add to this, I definitely exhibit the Chekov-heroine streak of the moderately orderly ex-Catholic and think hard work will redeem me (especially from my great sloth). 

So within these parameters I find most tweetstorms, and bestselling books, on productivity very funny, it being clear as day to me that the keys to success are a combination of luck, self-maiming stubbornness, and historical luck, if you trained me to be a highly productive ballerina I would probably still not make it into the Royal Ballet, but putting aside the absurdities and substitutions of productivity literature, the fact that instead of trying to raise the collective productivity levels of the West, we go and drop the macro altogether and turn the matter into personal stressors, is very telling. What if, instead of trying to be the most skilled violinist on the Titanic, we instead tried to not hit the iceberg? Imagine that.

But unless you’re a DAO person, the 2022 version of you will find coordination problems unsexy, the world is on fire so you’re clutching your own gadgets and enduring alone. When you feel alone, your own skillset, discipline, and competitive edges will of course seem madly important, there’s no one to rely on but stretched-out you. And you’ll read Horkeimer and Arendt and Paglia in your private time which you don’t have, to learn that it has happened on multiple occasions before, the individual got exhausted but there was no community to turn to, and then someone came and started shouting from a stage, and you couldn’t tell if it was true or not really, and you decided to follow, as following felt, at last, like rest. 

I have not given up on the macro and the coordination problem. You can give me the most productive schedule if my output is nothing. I don’t like nothing, how Baroque of me. But if we’re indeed in the middle of a crisis that means, historically and based on all prior evidence, that we’re busy collectively making something new already, with the labour and the pain, etc., included. I’d say I want to find the right words to describe it, but that wouldn’t be true. In fact, I want to understand what we’re already saying, what we seem to already know, the Great Resigners and the Tech Nomaders, the mushrooming communities starting anew.

Also, guys, I want to celebrate idleness. I haven’t had a single good idea in my life when I was busy. Interintellect, as all rituals, is all about uselessly spent time—the decadence of conversation and friendship, creating an empty space, a void of production, so meaning can arise, in the collective knitting together of stories until we spot the pattern that unites. You’ll find that you don’t need a top athlete’s discipline to accomplish the most important things that happen to you in your life, in fact, they’ll all feel like something that just happens.

I’ll write about self-observation as well, being a great believer in “what you want is what you do”, when you don’t know what you want, just watch what you do, on a Sunday or after hours, what you read, whom you call, there’s your answer. 

4. Battles Royales: Urgency and the Longterm, Sprints vs Marathons, Building the Future 

When I was around 30, time sped up for me. On the one hand, I had turned 30, that was weird. I’d heard that for a woman that was kind of it, arrivederci, life! In my twenties time didn’t exist, I was flaking about in my energetic way, in and out of jobs in the media and academia, always broke, always waiting for—I wasn’t sure what. I daydreamed, I devoured fiction. When I turned 30, I realised what I had been waiting for was to get married, and because that had not happened, I found that all my cultural prescriptions had expired, and I was completely free. So the sped-up internal deadline for old-lady me to get my shit together and the intoxicating freedom of what expanded in front of me indefinitely led to the surprising twist that, unlike my original plan to party in my 20s and then retire like Proust to write about it from bed, I found myself, unexpectedly, as an immigrant and a breadwinner, a rebel against violence I had always seen as normal domestically, and, in general, someone who started over so late. 

When I became, three years later, a startup founder in London, the manic timelapse of building technology made perfect sense to me. I stopped sleeping and got busy, self-scolded for a lost afternoon, I stopped writing and reading fiction, I grew dynamically depressed, depressedly dynamic, I had a blast. When I was young, people would see me as flighty and capricious, now there I was to prove my iron will, my epic perseverance. The strength and self-preservation that I developed to manage intrafamilial catastrophes was now freed up to serve my career, to serve other people. I surprised people. My father, the last time that I saw him, four years ago, while repeating that I was a “fuckhead” and a “soulless c––” in an outdoor restaurant, expressed respect for my sudden professional aptitude. Startup founders understand the fog of change, the power of the present. I’ll venture that the startup founding trend is in part a product of an unwanted familiarity with constant crisis and an already warped time.

I’m lucky to have friends with whom one can quote Leonard Cohen, and I often do, the lines I’ve never liked it fast / You want to get there soon / I want to get there last, and while I pride myself and my generation on thinking fast when necessary, the wit, the Snaps, the crowdfunding, the TikTok response videos, the adaptability, building for the long-term is becoming increasingly important to me. And since I am like everybody else, I assume that if I, despite trying to not waste even one morning, or at least feeling very guilty when I do, really think in expanses of unknowable future decades, engaged not in sprints, whatever your product manager says, but in marathons, then this is likely a more common than assumed internal rhythm for us all. How we talk about personal and professional time today oscillates between extremes: there’s the day to day rush and then the unfathomable, never before this long lifespan. Students think in semesters, startup founders in quarters, parents in years… I want more era-based thinking, intuitions formalised into narrative, the where this is going over the how fast.

The talent, luck, and stubbornness discussed in the previous section all unfold in time. Stamina, especially when combined with enjoyment and a choice of goal, trumps most other strengths. One danger of an ever-still present, and a moral loosening of hierarchies, is that we forget about stamina. But stamina is worth building even blindly. To quote a smart friend of mine, any decision is better than none, any direction is better than stopping. It is a fact of life that if you think long-term, you will eventually outrun a lot of those competing for the same loot. Yes, you will need to deal with how that feels when it happens. Maybe this is why startups, academics, journalists, scientists seem hurried around like horses at some race without leaving them much time to think, no one has the right story for why winning in the end will feel legitimate to you, or what winning even is.

I’m not the first one to point out the Inter-Era’s internal conflicts over excellence. As discussed before, we strive for self-improvement, a self-fulfilling self-branding, productivity prowess, but what happens to those who make it to the top is a whole other matter. We used to envy those in the limelight, I doubt this is still the case. The public scrutiny, even hatred, toward those who rise in the ranking system we’re also part of betrays our frayed relationship with it and I assume discourages some types of ambition. I have great trust in the moral immune system of communities, I trust our meaning-making and know we can build new arcs, but the fact remains that we’re deep in the interregnum, and if we want the excellence of those who can contribute it, and to extend who can strive for excellence in the first place, then the sacrifices this work requires need to resume being socially attractive. We will never find perfect people who can become excellent, but we can agree and decide on what imperfections we’re OK with, and then let those who can do the inventing, organising, analysing, and funding required for any production do their jobs. I want good books, good administrators, good food, good music, good childcare, good churches, and so do you. I want to be able to be good at what I do, and so do you.

5. Language and Systems of Meaning 

It happened late for me, it was only when I emigrated for good, and stayed abroad for good, that language and reality started splitting for me. I’d read Stanislas Dehaene and observe my brain that still only remembers and counts numbers, and number-meaning formulae like F=ma, in Hungarian, with whole areas of my brain inaccessible to language however well I can speak it. I touched the surface of things, the edges, and I wondered. 

Most of 2022 life, of course, sprouts ahead intangibly, on keyboards and on screens, as data, and you’d think words would fail to keep up with this, but I don’t think so. In fact, words have found a very cosy container in code, something they’ve been waiting for since the first type became moveable, this world of unfurling fiction that is technology has captured the human language. 

When we talk about the meaning crisis, the staring at the phone, the empty I love you, the bowling online alone, what we describe is not really a vacuum, but rather a Wordle of horror vacui, new stacks of constant, thickening speech, we’re in Signifier Land, the semiotic orgy that is the Absolute Internet, soon we won’t even say “internet” or add “online”, it will just be where you live. (When NFT people talk about online postcodes, don’t think they’re kidding.) It is the touch that has no name now, there are too many names around, they rotate until they give out, the very few things that matter become quiet, they’re left out of the noise.

All this is probably fine. Remember, we’re in the Inter-Era, this too shall pass, we’ll figure it out. Whether you put a “ugh” in doughnut, offer your preferred pronouns or not, you’ll admit that every system of meaning we’ve ever come up with was the result of some rite of agreement, of synods, and talmudic commentaries, constitutional conventions, peace accords. There’s a symbolism metabolism to the collective mind and I see no reason why it should be different now. I know some think this is our doom, I don’t think so, I think this is an honest moment, a moment of quality in the chaos. Your human brain is eminently capable of learning a new language, even when the one who speaks the new language is you. Even when you happen to be learning silence.  

We’ll talk about this some more. The old words invented to aid a life on Earth, now hijacked by a new world built of symbols. The real important things for which we need real important names that don’t become routine, or code. The meaning-refilling we’re better positioned than ever to turn into a collective act. I told you I haven’t given up on coordination problems.

6. Love and Community 

The caveat is this is my job. I know—the irony of a highly disagreeable hermit sitting in Europe running a delightful American online community. Life’s like that. I used to think my personal experience as a journalist in Budapest, my first organisation which introduced popular feminism to the public consciousness in Hungary, and then my film work in the UK which focused on the great human agonies of history, would predestine me, within my chosen life field that is technology, to create self-protective and soothing connection products, to prep for the drama. But after a couple of years of independent research and bootstrapping, I closed my first startup which was trying to build a linguistically mediating AI for online chatters, looking to prevent internet wars one personal conversation at a time, and started the movement which I lead now, an open, trusting, breezy weak-ties bet on how the liminal space between public and private—we run small, paid, online cultural events—glues together a healthier society. 

People in my community, members, audience, hosts, my team, are geographically remote, linguistically diverse, politically uncategorisable, and usually have experiences of outsiderness, whether through immigration, political soloing, or belonging to a cultural minority. 

I was scared when I started my first startup and listened to messages that confirmed my apprehensions. I’d been told by the establishment of the time that the internet was a toxic shitshow, and so, to assuage my fears, I tried to code a shield that people could use to not get hurt. I was so wrong. After 1,500 conversations in Interintellect, how we can create environments of peace through rituals and incentives people love and espouse is clearer to me. It keeps me thinking what else I might be so wrong about. People do find community and belonging on the internet. Instead of radicalising, they change careers to something they love, move countries to follow their tastes, and fall in love and get married to people they met on Twitter, in Interintellect, in the comment sections of Substack. When I left my family and restarted my life with a couple of books and a suitcase, having left my good name, my apartment, my entire social capital, the value of my three master’s degrees, and my dignity behind, it was the internet that gave me a chance, for the cost of exactly 0 dollar, to quickly rebuild my network, skillset, and status, relying solely on my own knowledge, ideas, and social instincts. I met all of my non-Hungarian friends on the internet, I built my company there, have revenue, raised capital, traveled, experienced personal breakthroughs, even fell in love a few times. What cities used to be, today online communities are. My story is more common than you think, come to an Interintellect salon and hear how people’s lives open up, turning toward the people they’ve looked for and finally found, like the sun.

There are other things that mainstream narratives misrepresent. Take, for instance, our love lives. I will talk more about this if you’re interested. The caveat is—well I am far from neutral. Are you? I’d volunteer that 70% of the political reactionaryism of Millennials and GenZ are just people wanting a loving relationship and to settle down. We talk about people trying to find their dignity, lost, as discussed earlier, for words, living through an Inter-Era when solving the ailments of the superstructure keeps falling on the individual. Based on what I can observe, the much reproached “prudery” of our generation seems to just be wanting more. Having grown up as the child of Boomers who’d burn down families and livelihoods in recurring bouts of carpe diem, and adding my personal experiences of constant harassment (and fear) that I took for a normal part of life for so long, I can’t really blame them. Again, I posit that my life story is quite common, if our words are standing out there waiting for new meanings, then “relationship” sure seems to be one of them. And, as someone pretty fixated on the scope of my hard-earned freedom, I’d like to include a shoutout here to the psychedelic-polyamory contingent within our midst, and the alternatives they represent and experiment with, making me more hopeful that individuals can re-learn how to form couples, and then families, in a way that matches their personal tastes best. 

Coincidentally, we’ve just hosted an Interintellect salon with the WaPo columnist Christine Emba, who goes full Aristotle (“willing the good”) when talking about better relationships. I’ll use the word dignity. For self, and for Other.

7. Immigration, Identity 

When I arrived in London in September 2013, I found myself a part of a multimillion-sized Eastern European exodus but no story. It would have felt less lonely if there was a story. I lived there for over six years, feeling completely invisible. I knew that my accent was “bad”, that the guy from The Economist called me up after he liked my writing, but hearing my voice he quickly hung up on me. I knew the guys who’d hit on me went for an easy score, since in their cultural hierarchy I was equal to nothing. When I lived in London I ended up choosing to not date anyone for four years. I would take the Tube to my customer service job at 5 am, reading almost as much that year as during my undergrad, it was still dark outside, I’d ride with a small assortment of workers up to Wembley, feeling there should be a tale that explains us. A song on a guitar. An art-house movie with shaking camera. A memorial and a name.

I was translating young adult novels at the time, and saw my language fall apart in front of me. Into bits. They say community founders and joiners come from the outside, they who have lost forms of belonging see them as a construct not as a given, they know you have to, that you can, build this. The transition from world user to world builder was a painful one for me, I wouldn’t have ended my intellectual’s meta-existence if it hadn’t been for the general turmoil of 2015-2016, when I felt my personal weaknesses simply no longer mattered, I looked at my CV to see how I could help, and got started. In moments of linguistic chaos you need the immigrants. In gap-eras you need the outsiders’ unbiased view. It’s not only children who are surprised by every little thing, so are the newcomers, those fresh pairs of eyes. We see beauty where you don’t, we spot solutions where you can’t. If we’re rebuilding language now, I want us, the aliens, to whom everything sounds so very strange already, to offer our help. 

I want to counter the chronicled loss of communities with the building movements of those who had to restart, who rethink what “ties” mean, who have reverse engineered attachment. If our generation will have to be leaders through a reboot, let’s hear out those who have done it personally before.

Being a cultural alien, I’ve remained largely outside identity politics so I won’t be able to comment much on that. But personal identity interests me, mainly because, being in a shift within a shift (within a shift within a shift, etc.), I feel like mine is changing. I’m 38 and this is the first time when I feel I have a personal identity, if not fully un-memetic then at least a collage from sources of my own choosing. Before I left my family, my actions were rooted in my negating whatever they would do, I was bound into a binary, locked into dialectic. The ensuing feeling of liberation led directly to my daring to start a company and build a semi-public profile. But launching a career calls for new allegiances. Now I am old enough to know when someone in my industry—mostly tech, libertarian, American—thinks something about me is “special”, whether that thing really is just a legacy of, say, my Budapest university education, and all my former classmates would in fact say/think/know the same, or if it’s something that I truly, personally, originally, have come up with, through my life experience, intelligence, or mistake. So I will try to talk about that, what kind of identity comes after the immigrant’s strange anti-identity, when you’ve become free, when your identity has left the dialectic.

8. God and the Self

The caveat is this is so complicated. How dare I. My smartest friends chase ego death and seek salvation in one another. I remember feeling uncomfortable in therapy, the very setting blocking the fluctuations that is our self, every question addressing an earlier you, who’s to respond a moment later? I kept remarking to my therapist that this is just my side of things, that it feels unfair to sit here with my colourful descriptions of all the wrongs I have suffered. I recalled Catholic school, the confession, how weirdly intimate it all was, how much the priests seemed to enjoy it. The absolute power over another’s soul, the kneeling girl. I wrote about this before, it’s not a secret, that when I was around 11, I was in a Catholic church listening to a Poor Clare novice recounting her pilgrimage, and I had an epiphany, my skull opened to light, and I changed right there and then, and I am the same person now as who came to be on that day. I come from a mostly Jewish family of social adventurers, academe, showbusiness, no God.

Later, researching other religions and religiousness in general, I of course understood that my rapture was religion-independent, that there are many portals through which one can go up, some more enriching than others. It was only much later, in my late 20s, that I understood the matter and the atom too, and the maddeningly bipedal existence of humans, in depth, and I grew sad. 

Before the Inter-Era, politically I counted as a religion-tolerant leftie, I think, I’m not sure if that category will survive the shift. I do think with prosperity comes gratitude, and I believe strongly that most religions arose not from fear but from gratitude, and guilt. Cain and Abel gave back to the Earth, to its assumed ruler, the surplus they felt they had taken, the animals that only existed because they’d bred them, the plants that only grew after the sons’ planting and care. It has long been my theory that the guilt felt over the surplus, over our intervention, over messing with the natural, led directly to appeasement and to sacrifice, and then to ritual, and then to religion. Based on this logic, I can’t agree with the anti-religion part of the progress movement: the more we’ll grab and in the more unnatural ways, the bigger the religious backlashes will continue to be. If you believe in balance, and the mental metabolism of the human collective, you might feel this is acceptable. You might think no hatha yoga Zoom class can suffice to replace the inner urge of a sacrifice of giving back.

Since Derek Parfit died without my ever meeting him, I keep shamelessly emailing thinkers who matter to me, thankfully my current job enables this, I’d rather make an idiot of myself than to miss out. I’ll talk a bit about Parfit’s tunnel analogy, and the blurry lines around our selves, and the glory of occasional surrender to the inexplicable, the irrational. 

9. Trauma and Truth 

When I was a child a war broke out in the former Yugoslavia, and then went on for nine long years. At the time, my family was wealthy and cruel and quite desperate, and I remember watching on our TV the cruelty suffered by those who’d lost everything and were also desperate. In high school, I understood where my interest had sprung from, and I went and read everything I could about the Second World War. In my 20s, I built relationships with estranged branches of my family in Budapest and in Israel, and interviewed older relatives who survived the Holocaust. I’d read the Auschwitz memoir written by my grandfather’s little sister, Alíz, Branches without Root. I would never look at the role of stamina and luck the same way again. I had never since then taken any of my possessions for granted.

We like to forget that the world is a very violent place. We shroud our violence in the social graces then rush into therapy wondering why we’re so agitated and hurt. Without asking to change the law, I do know that words can kill when someone’s only weapon is words, and when they really want to. Authority breeds hierarchy breeds social order breeds safety from violence, so if we go back to my first point in this piece, the authority crisis, the stakes should be clear. The Ukraine War has to remind you that the violence of our species can’t be geographically contained, not every aggression will take a proxy, as every woman knows. 

When things get too real, I turn to fiction, I heard recently that fiction is where reality goes to practice, that it’s a laboratory for reality, how accurate, I thought of my hero Margaret Schlegel, with her books and translations, her life of lettres, and the violence protruding into her home, through her walls, her affiliations, and her blood, and love. I always envied her as I'd had home-grown violence myself, her lace collar, the brooch, the Edwardian, momentary, respite. I remember first seeing the genius Audiard’s unloved The Beat My Heart Skipped, so close to home I could barely watch it, the son of the petty, pitiful criminal learning concert piano, feeling the purpose and catharsis of the high art all the more with his experience of the brutal streets of Paris. One of the best pieces I’ve ever read on movies, by Ebert on Scorsese, describes how the drawing rooms of The Age of Innocence were just as violent as the world of Raging Bull, it is the same thing, the killing, the eloquence, the fish knife, and the mouthguard, Wharton’s willowy creatures would mob up on their enemies just the same, they would drop their corsets without thinking, if they could, in their plush-cushioned Rhythm 0. The best line I’ve ever read about astrology was that a Libra is an Aries wearing a glove, how accurate, aren’t we all.

I made a strange zigzag when establishing my personal safety, I’d first started a company and community to build a better, safer pocket for humans to experiment and to grow, and only then did I move myself too, in the service of the bigger plan, to a safe location. I live today among my books and my vases of flowers, the sun is shining, my balcony is warm. I flew back to Budapest a few days after the Ukraine War started, found knowledge in some old boxes after four years away, saw how industrious and disciplined I was as a young writer, how much I dismissed my own efforts as a dilettante, a fake. On the way back I flew via Zurich, flew into that fortress of mountains, so uninvadable I was moved. Then I took yet another plane, flew even further into the West, I went on a walk in Brussels, reached the Jean-Félix Hap Park, looked at the flowers in the early March cold, and I cried. We always forget about the glove. I watched peace uncurl at my feet. I flew twice to sit there, and not be hurt.

It remains my conviction that only people who understand violence can build safe places, that peace is always kept by armies. After I had to leave my family, I had PTSD for nine months, I didn’t have any thoughts for nine months, I read hard science books and suddenly understood them, I listened to Chopin on high volume and all of Bob Dylan to have something in there maybe stir, I was sitting in my London room and I could literally feel my brain getting rewired—some things getting lost, how vulnerable, some things being opened up like new rooms—and my whole self changing. I had always been fascinated by whatever happened in those months, to my memories, my fear response, my occasional urge to hide. So many startup founders I talk to went through something similar, you can’t do great things unless it’s only the second hardest thing you’ve ever done. It was around that time that I first read about Garmezy, and about the strategies of resilient children, the learning from adversity, the seeking out mentors to replace absentee parents, I’d done all of that, I would read about it and cry. When I had PTSD, I had no concept of the future. During the first year, I couldn’t even visualise the next day, it was very limiting, then it gradually expanded back to near-normal, took me five-six years, this is all pretty recent, it was the price of freedom. I find the knowledge built during that time useful in a fog of change, the stillness of the abuzz present to me feels familiar, the invincibility that your scars give you, the pity for others born out of your pain.     

Trauma gives us insight into how the most extreme subjective experiences relate to objective wrongdoing, the alignment between the inner feeling and the external judgement, which is indispensable for justice. The core of the self, however fluid we might feel our other parts to be, stands untouchable, inviolable, full of promise of recovery. I wonder whether peace is part of an indissoluble dialectic, always a negation of the swords in flames, the park where you sit down, the flowers you watch over, the others you invite in to show them it's safe. 

I will write about the limits I fear exist to what we call peacetime, what you carve it out from, what you protect it from, and my personal and professional strategies for living unhurt.

10. Virtue and Sin 

I must have gone crazy. The caveat is I have no idea. Like all of you, I’m also in an ethical cha-cha between Kant and the utilitarians, like all of you, I also can’t make it work. I’m adding here, because you keep talking about it, the EA movement and Aristotle and the good life. Because I too want a good life, this of course concerns me. But here, your mileage varies. It seems like people who feel they live virtuously, feel happier. People who feel anxious, you tell me that straightening out your life, whatever that means to you, will help you to clear out your mind, too. There’s research to agree with you. 

But personally, I’m on the fence about happiness. I know revelling doesn’t make me longterm happy, I worked in the music industry, I partied in my own half-assed way, I felt the ecstasy, I felt the mind-stretch, but I was not happy. And I did the Apollonian retreat, moulding at home without sunshine, reading and working, I was not happy. I did the cool girlboss thing too, went into fancy meeting rooms in tight pants, got the All Access pass, it felt pointless. I largely agree with the conservative strain of thinkers who dig up the old wisdom of how self-inflicted responsibility makes you happier, our gardens that we care for, I think that must be true. Starting a family, a company, does that to you. But perfect happiness in my life I have only ever felt in moments of utter peace, that transcendence, all worldless, in nature. Those brief moments of being a woman out alone, unbothered, watching a lake. Sitting on my carpet in my free time, realising it’s nearly morning, my neck stiff over a book, some unreal wall of reality broken down. A glint of grace covering all of the world.

I will write about goodness and happiness, I have more questions than answers. I’ll touch upon things that you ask me, like how much should you hate your job, how much should you give to charity, what if you turn into your parents. 

I have no idea where it’s all going, this text is already very different, going its own way, from what I expected. There is virtue to writing honestly, to bet in public with naked opinions, to offer life details, and there’s a sin to it too, exiting the CEO language, talking about others who might recognise themselves. Perhaps that’s my only current fixed take on virtue and sin, that it’s always some mélange of wrong and right, all we can hope for is to set the ratio right. Like you, I have also loved monsters, like you, I have also been wrong, aimed for good and caused much harm. I’ll try to keep those contradictions in mind, writing from a place of peace about war, from my living room filled with pillows and tulips about rage, while drawing up the future revealing the past.

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Bear with me.