The w!nd is the direction I am currently going. I was inspired about this by the Now Movement, a sententia to express what you are basically doing right now. As I am a pretty lazy guy when it comes to my own projects, I’ve modified the idea to fit into my Zen Garden. The w!nd is what currently moves me and influences my decisions. As you can imagine, winds can change their directions, split apart, come together and be whatever they want to be right now. To me, w!nd is “temporarily permanent”, my most used oxymoron.

Wind

Currently I am moved by the seemingly ignorance and disrespect of privacy by the lawmakers. Their plans to:

  • use biometric data
  • weaken encryption through forcing service providers to backup a “master key” for authroities
  • bypass encryption by installing keyloggers through trojans onto your device pre-encryption
  • declare service providers as telecommunication providers to have more rights to gain access

are a disgusting take on mass surveiling innocent citizen and only lower the bar to extend such laws and capacities / authorities.

In the same moment they try to restrict companies (which is fine to me) to gain data of their users. Making this seem like “protecting privacy, except from us”. This is making me scared to lose fundamental and general basic rights. Due to that I am currently focussed on digital privacy, data policy and civic rights. Feel free to talk to me about that topic, send me information and links to articles right into my DMs on Twitter.

Now

I quit!

As some of you already know, I have quit my co-founded agency effectively since 1st of January 2022. This was the second non-selfemployed job, where I got betrayed deeply. We had the goal to offer corporate level quality software for a low budged in exchange for us taking some time in doing it. I am sure you have heard of the triangle of economy. There are different vaariations of it, but I love the example of Quality - Affordability - Speed. You can only have two sides of a triangle to be sustainable, so we agreed on Quality and Affordability.

When my partner, our CEO, blindly followed the idea of our investor and raised the price we offered a client to double the amount and the client denied that and has chosen another agency, everything went downhill. He, out of my viewpoint, paniced and started instantly changing anything on the way we work. Everything had to be quick and cheap, to the cost of quality. We dropped conception, we dropped software invention and went full on frontend development. We turned into one like hundrets agencies in Berlin and started using free WordPress templates, selling them like “hot buns”, knowingly we would fool the clients by giving them a shitty product.

That was when I pulled the break, asked the CEO about where he sees our agency in six months and his answer honestly was: “I don’t know”. What kind of businessman are you if you do a full on U-turn on your own business ethics and don’t even know where you are heading. So this was the moment I told him that I am packing my bags and leaving this company as soon as legally possible. For me, there was not the slightest shine of hope. No “I don’t know, but maybe we can figure something out.”, no “I am not sure yet.” or “I am still trying to figure out the pivot.”

I understand that running your first company is hell of a ridee and most likely to fail, but betraying your ethics is, in my oppinion, something that has nothing to do with your work but with your ability to be yourself. And I obviously do not want to work with someone who, just because of a single down, turns his back to his own ethics.

Figuring out myself

So here I am, taking some off-time for my mental health and doing some smaller projects and doing dev-experiments to afford living. But I am still unsure about where to go from here. German laws & tax regulations make freelancing more about self-organisation than the actual work, and so far every employment I’ve been in was a extreme let down. No, I am not going to change to fit into a system everyone complains about. Work is about self-fullfilment and contributing to society, not “Work to live” or “Live to work”. You are the change, so if you don’t work and fight for the world you want to live in, then you shouldn’t be surprised if you look back at your life, saying “I wish I would have lived more.” instead of working in a job where you have to fit into a form instead of the company learning to adjust to the employees.

No, I am not light headed or a unrealistic utopist. Jobs and companies like this exist. I’ve seen them myself, friends work in them. But sadly it is one in 100 maybe even one in 1.000 companies, that don’t see employees as “Human Resource” but as humans, the people that make your company possible. It is a easy sustainable equasion: Happy, healthy, enthusiastic employees = productive employees. Don’t read and talk about “New Work”, but actually live it!

So yes, I am unsure about my work future. I don’t know what to do and I don’t know how. But one thing is for sure, I know my worth, I know my quality and I know that I won’t ever take shit again. Mutual respect. Life over work. Humans over products.

Update Mid 2023

I am on it. i figured out that I want to focus on my creative side at work and take programming back to a hobby level. Even though I am probably more suited programming for a living, I prefer to put my artistic side in work. Programming has always been a hobby for me since my early teen years and I felt the more I put the effort into making this a living, the less I felt happy in my private life (besides my awesome friends!). I am currently looking for open positions.

Generative Art

Currently I am tinkering around with procedural generated art. It surely is a fun topic to dive in to enhance my JS and R coding skills and learn new conceptual methods of coding.

Web3 - The future?

Also a big topic for me atm is web3. While I am not a fan of the scam-y hype, I also see the positive benefits of web3, DLT and NFTs. They are tools, they are not responsible for their abuse. They where made to disrupt a decades old industry and if we always remember that, we can do great things with them and implement them into the daily life. The tech they are now might not be the tech that will be stable in the future, but following the hands-on-imperative, you can be sure that these tools and that tech can and will do great things for humanity.

Planning

Currently I have no plans. For current ideas and plans, check out my Seeds.

Learning & collecting insight

  • enhancing my JS skills
  • headless CMS
  • getting to know myself better
  • automation
  • decentralization & dWeb
  • transhumanism
  • maximum sustainability design-extremism
  • the human species withouth planet Earth
  • uniting humanity

Doing

At the moment I am working on “Realm of Fantasy Lords”.

Listening

Working on restructuring my music section. Please be patient

For more music, feel free to check out my music page in the inspiration section.

Reading

Currently I am not reading any book, but I enjoy reading philosophical articles about humanism and futurism. Especially those that focus on a united species of “Humans”.

Watching

My focus of concepting my first game has taken me into a busy state. Sadly I do not have enough time to commit to any movies or series, but I do enjoy watching an anime or two recently. Latest Anime I watched was Mob Psycho (2nd rewatch) and Wolf’s rain, the first Anime I ever watched as kid.

Traveling

No travels planned. Japan 2025 in planning.