Hanaffan
Growing up
Already as a child I moved around quite a bit and had to change school more frequently than normal. So I learned really early to adapt me to unknown circumstances and to make friends. The easiest way I found to get to know people and to be accepted is to be the loudest on every party, staying till the end and drinking the last beer. In this way one can make many friends really fast, but often it ends up in a superficial friendship which you can not count much on. Still I did this a lot and was really known in the area I was moving around in. So much that at the age of 21 I decided to stop drinking, as I felt that it made me more and more aggressive and influenced my life in a negative way.
An other more promising way to find friends when coming to a new place is to stick with other people who do not seem to really fit in any group. This way I always met somebody really interesting. Both tactics made me get to know and be known by a lot of people. But once you leave your place of fame, you realize on how many people you can really count. Especially when you do not use a mobile phone or any kind of social media which I detested at that time after some changes in my life.
At the age of 20 I sold my car because after two accidents I realized that all the work i did in my free-time during high-school was for nothing but this car. I stopped using my mobile phone after the company I had a contract with prolonged my contract without even asking me for doing so. I unplugged my TV after I realized how much time I lost just watching the Simpsons. Luckily I did all this at the right moment to still be able to pass my a-levels.
In general I started to reject a lot of things that are so normal in our society. The reason was that this whole moving around made me aware of how similar human relations worked in different locations. And somehow I did not like the way things were working in Germany. All this consumption and competition about consumption. It made me sick.
I felt a little better during my social work year when I had to work with a team of incredibly nice people, taking care of elders suffering of dementia in its late stages. It was tuff work, cleaning, feeding, clothing these old people who were acting like little children. But even though it was not easy, I am more than happy now that I made this experience as it surely increased my social awareness. Actually in a society where we live so close together it should be mandatory. Instead of forcing people to learn how to use a gun they should first be able to take care of each other without feeling disgusted.
Even though this was a very good experience it still did not change the opinion I had formed about society until then.
So I decided to experience life in a way that should be completely different to what I was used to. Young and naive as I was I joined the next best thing that gave me the possibility to actually do this even though I did not have an Euro in my pocket. Before I went to University I joined an in total 15 month program offered by a college in England which is part of the Humana empire, an organisation nobody heard of but which still is omnipresent. Anybody thinking to join this college be aware that you can not trust the organisation and they will make you suffer a lot. But the good thing is that you can make friends from all over the world and suffer together with them, what will deepen your friendship even more. Of the few people I can confidently call my best friends I got to know one within this organisation and every time we meet we still end up at some point talking about the crazy experiences that we got through in the parallel world of this organisation.
University
With this kind of mindset I ended up in University studying philosophy and cultural anthropology. Of course this made me even more radical. I now not only rejected to own unnecessary technology and the use of social media. No, I also tried to only consume products form the country in which I am, meat I would only eat if I saw the living animal before, flights I would only take if they were intercontinental and then only if I stayed in the other continent for at least a month and I rejected people taking photos of me as I considered them an unworthy attempted to capture reality. That is also why there are no photos of that time of my life.
In my study time I mainly studied and worked, without any great leisure so I had the means and the time in my semester breaks to go out, traveling the world, trying to make some sense of it. I visited my friends in Africa again, made an exchange year in Spain, hitch-hiked all over Europe, from Germany to Spain several times and in Brazil for two months. Always traveling with hardly anything on me, as material possessions only meant unnecessary worries while traveling.
You can say that I was lost, looking for answers, looking for a way to “change the world”. Philosophy, in the beginning, seemed to be able to show me a way of how to change the world. But in the end all it taught me was that every answer can be questioned and real truth is not much more than an agreement between us people, meaning an objective truth is not existing. Mainly Philosophers became famous because they were able to defend and express the Zeitgeist of their era in a well elaborated way. Not the book changes the world but the world expresses its change in a book. So no world changing by writing a well respected work in Philosophy.
No objective truth? No undoubtable right nor wrong? This would be the point where many people become religious, but when you are so used to asking questions and looking for answers it is impossible to become religious, because religion demands you to stop asking questions. I had to live with it and keep on searching. The next hope for an answer was to see if a different social order would be providing some positive input so I went to Venezuela.
Conclusion
After spending so many efforts trying to understand this world, I had to accept, that I can not force the world to change, but that I have to accept the world how it is first. If I detest the whole world for how it is, then the world will never listen to me. And even then, as there is no real objective truth, it is impossible to convince people of fundamental believes just by talking and discussing. Mainly people turn out to become aggressive when bringing up what would count as a reasonable argument against their fundamental believes.
I still stick to many of the principles I formed when younger, though I became more flexible and less radical. I opened up a little bit, accepting some of the means offered by modern society. I can live in society without complaining about it all the time, as I learned to accept reality. And In general there is hope, because in all our travels we always met more people we considered good than people we considered bad. The problem mainly is that the “good people” are not as much attracted by power.
As this site obviously shows, I agreed to the use of quite some technology in order to make this site possible. It was not an easy decision. After I had been traveling by myself for so long time, I made a lot of incredible experiences, which broadened my horizon. But till then it was all just for me alone. For others it was just some story interesting to listen to, like fairy tales. Though I am sure that a lot of the things I did and saw would have been helpful for other people as well. I felt a big urge to share my life, to motivate others to also leave their comfort zone and explore the world instead of just receiving its images from TV. And as it is difficult to reach people by a book nowadays, the Internet was where to go.