fascinated by the human experience

In an increasingly fast paced world it seems all too easy to be caught up in some form of ignorance. People generally get caught up in an ego, a concept of self: a collection of beliefs about oneself that embodies the answer to "who am I?". Any answer to this question seems to constrain someone's ability to be human to the full potential. "I'm a business developer" I used to say when I had a job. I obtained self-esteem from thinking it was an important thing in the eyes of others. I believed it signaled status, money, being highly educated, and more. I did not notice that any such form of clinging to a self-concept actually suppressed the richness of life itself.

Having studied Economics & Business, I see the identification of oneself along the lines of a job function or any form of occupation as the most prominent way of self-delusion amongst my peers, and perhaps globally. Although a guess would be that males are actually more vunarable to this deception than women are. As the above business developer example shows: it's something I've caught myself doing. Interestingly, automation is making human work less and less necessary. I have a lawyer friend, a doctor sister and my parents are in retail. All jobs perfectly suitable for some form of AI to take over. This trend will leave a large portion of the workforce without a job in the probably-sooner-than-expected future (check out the probability of your job being stolen by robots on this infographic). Alarmingly, for those stuck with a self-concept heavily dependent on their job, loosing their job means losing their identity. For this reason and about a thousand others I see learning how to be a human that is able to detach from any form of self-concept as highly urgent. For myself, for others. It isn't for nothing that Yoval Noah Harari cites this trend as one of his 21 lessons for the 21st century.

On this blog I write about my own process of detaching from a self-concept. It is mainly a way for me to practice transparency. The blog is a showcase of my own vulnerability, for which I'll have to conquer my own barriers first. It, in short, adds to my own path towards understanding how rich a human life can be. Inspiring others is an unnecessary, but valuable, extra.

I started making my first scary steps away from my ego in 2015. Read about it in this warrior post. This in turn made me build the courage to fulfill a dream: to ride a bicycle from Amsterdam to Singapore. It was this adventure for which I originally started this blog and it is actually this adventure that has contributed significantly to my understanding of who I am, and that brought me Vipassana, a technique with which I'm able to fast-forward my personal growth. Besides living a quite regular life again currently I've discovered an unshaken determination to dive deep into what it means to be human.