2026-06-20 07:00:00
Never has a first-party game been more honest and self-aware about its circumstances than Segagaga. A coda to the Dreamcast's troubled life released a few short months after Sega announced its withdrawal as a platform maker, Segagaga morbidly revels in the dire situation of the eponymous(-ish) company and its workers with the sort of bleak gallows humor you'd expect to find in, say, World War II movies about "the front." Only, instead of soldiers inside grimy trenches quipping about bad rations and dwindling ammo supplies, it's unkempt, heavily overworked developers all but shackled to their cubicles inside of dingy vaults, trapped from seeing the light of day as protagonist Taro wards off roaming bands of influenza.
This is no allegory. Segagaga has nary a romanticized bone in its gaunt body to be found. "Everything you've heard about Japanese game development and more is true, and nowhere is it more true than here at Sega at the turn of the millennium," the game morosely reiterates with every mission doled out, every NPC conversation, and every combat encounter. A certain undercurrent of cynicism permeates throughout that can only come from those who have truly lived the life they're depicting and witnessed how the digital sausage is made, exaggerated or not. Even so, cynicism by itself is rarely constructive and Segagaga isn't a game that takes the easy way out by glibly giving into it. What it actually is, in no uncertain terms, is a game about loving somebody at their worst, somebody who hits the bottom again and again, only to break through the floor and fall even deeper with each passing day.
A quarter of a century later, it's a game that I myself deeply relate to in some ways, having entered my 12th year in Japanese-to-English game localization this past April. The only game industry I know is the Japanese one and never is it for the faint of heart. I have taken on weighty workloads with inadvisable deadlines made viable only with the energy and single-minded dedication of youth. I have had the long nights on the job, staying up until the break of dawn, workshopping and refining the most minute details in pursuit of a translation that sings. Things where the raw dollar-and-cents return I was poised to earn for such minuscule amounts of material couldn't possibly justify the investment I put into them. I have had—and sometimes lost—the battles with my superiors, my agencies, and my clients to do right by their games and their audience. I have had projects cancelled on me after months of working onto them, their divulgence forever verboten by NDAs. I have lost contracts and promises of work and money even after winning it all fair and square because I just happened to rub the wrong person in power the wrong way a little too much for a little too long. And I have stuck it out in this industry doing what I do despite it All, despite the politics and the pay and the lack of job security, because I genuinely believed in what I was doing like nothing else I have done in my life. For the love of the game that is Japanese video games.
Segagaga languished for decades as one of those stubborn holdouts whose English translation just never seemed like it could come together, even as white whales that eluded fan translators for decades were tamed in the end. I would know better than most: I was once asked early in my career if I would join the ranks of one such project that was always on-again, off-again. From what I gather, even Sega itself explored ways to bring out an official localization, belated as it would've been. Yet it remained the exceptionally rare kind of fan translation target where no amount of desire, reverse engineering insights, and translator prowess ever proved to be enough to coalesce into a final, playable patch. Even Tokimeki Memorial, a similarly troublesome game that many romhackers had written off despite its significance, fell a few years ago at last and you can now play it in a language you probably understand... kind of. (Look, there's still work to be done and it's a matter of public record that I have some strong opinions on the version those of you reading this can actually play as of this writing.)
This state of affairs ostensibly changed a few months ago when an English patch at last emerged almost 25 years to the day of its original launch. That is, with a lede that was buried by both the team behind it and especially by many enthusiast sites promoting its release: the translation wasn't produced from scratch by humans from start to finish. Rather, the script was, in the project's own words on its GitHub page, "developed using a combination of DeepL and ChatGPT 4o/4.5. That translation then went through a substantial, months-long human translator review." In professional circles, we call such a process MTPE, or "machine translation post-editing." During it, the first pass of a translation is done by a machine translator like, indeed, DeepL, ChatGPT, or Google. It's then a human translator's job to review that output by comparing the generated translation against the source text, make any corrections where necessary, and deliver a polished final product, or at minimum something more presentable than the machine could've managed by itself.
At least, that's the elevator pitch that translation agencies routinely sell to spendthrift clients. I've already litigated the practical realities of MTPE on the ground on this very blog at length, so I won't repeat myself here. (Though, at the risk of adding another 2500 words of homework, I encourage you to go back and read it first if you aren't familiar with MTPE and its myriad shortcomings.) As anyone familiar with that post and my work in general can likely surmise, suffice it to say, the abrupt conclusion of Segagaga's protracted localization journey in such a manner was deeply demoralizing. While preliminary translation patches made with more rudimentary machine translators have, for better or worse, existed for a long time, the precipitous increase in LLM usage combined with MTPE as a supposed guardrail tells me that these teams are either insufficiently considering the practical and ethical implications of their methodology, or disregarding them outright. For my money, the fact this is happening more frequently with high profile games such as Segagaga suggests to me that it may well often be a case of the latter.
As much as I genuinely urge such teams to rescind their work and take down any patches, even after the fact, I also recognize that the cat is unfortunately out of the bag and many more cats will probably be let out of just as many bags so long as access to LLM models remains affordable, something which itself may not remain true for long. Be that as it may, speaking as a former fan translator myself, LLMs and MTPE present further problems specific to fan translation that merit discussion in addition to the broader issues I've already explored at length in my previous post linked above. At the root of it all is an important question that I want to ask. Namely, what does translation do to the translated work and for it?
I don't mean what a translation, when done properly, accomplishes on a mechanical level. You know what my basic job description is. Nor am I here to debate the supposed merits of translation versus localization writ large. (It's a false dichotomy, even outside creative mediums.) What I'm really asking is, what happens to a work once it's been translated, especially for the first time? In entertainment media and video games in particular, where translations are often the most time and labor-intensive to realize, most works make the jump to another given language only once. Barring exceptional situations, in the vast majority of cases, the first translation into that language is the only one that work ever receives, officially sanctioned or otherwise. In turn, it becomes the de facto way that audience can and will ever engage with that piece, the very grammar and semantics available to that language informing how people observe even objective realities of that content.
In other words, when you're translating somebody else's creation and especially when that translation is taking place in your chosen language for the very first time, you're not only speaking on another creator's behalf. As I've said many times, translation is an act that inherently requires that you put words into people's mouths. Not only the fictional mouths of the characters you're borrowing, but also those of the real people behind them. To a large extent, you're defining nothing less than that work's very legacy and that of its creators in abstentia. That new audience's first and quite likely only impression of it will be profoundly dictated by the choices you make throughout that process, the ensuing conversations being ones in which those creators likely cannot participate.
That is a heavy, heavy responsibility. I say this not to discourage other translators from making bold, creative choices in their approach. On the contrary, the job often demands it and no amount of attempted deferment to the supposed objectivity of translation dictionaries (or, indeed, LLMs and machine translators) will lighten the weight of that burden. Rather, I say this to stress what is always at stake when you decide to sit down and attempt to represent the work and mindset of somebody else with your own words. It may well be the only shot that media ever gets at reaching people within your sphere, making it imperative to aim both well and true.
More than other fields of translation, games and other entertainment exhibit what I've come to term as "self-evident context." That is, as bespoke creations, the words and ideas contained within them aren't strictly confined to our own reality. They can and often do have their own underlying histories and etymology informing their usage within that world. Any respectable translation concerned with accuracy must take those differences into consideration, as well as how audiences in the source and target languages alike each perceive those word choices. Something in mecha fiction might in its native language, for instance, call its take on giant robots "dolls" because of their lack of autonomy. It's then up to the translator to determine if a direct translation of the word "doll" adequately maintains the intended metaphor, or if they need to adopt a superficially different term that can nevertheless evoke similar ideas.
This is what makes the use of machine translators of any sort insidiously dangerous to deploy on creative projects. The algorithms underpinning them by their very nature force them to bias potential translations based on likelihood, which they in turn ultimately determine by their average frequency in A:B comparisons, as well as potential proximity to other, related words. While they may sometimes happen to be incidentally fed fictional material as a matter of course, they have no means of discerning it as uniquely fiction in contrast with the rest of its archived material derived from the real world. All of it is simply lumped together as "language" in a murky stew comprised of infinite ingredients in varying proportions. This makes the systems mathematically incapable of weighing potential translation candidates rooted in fiction more heavily than anything else they can unearth when tasked with translating fiction. Doing so would essentially require them to be fed more fictional sources of material than real ones such that the probabilities and averages arrived at favor the former, which is inconceivable.
When considering that diligent translations also must bear in mind the holistic, big picture needs of the source's themes and narrative, not simply moment-to-moment, or even line-by-line semantic parity, machine translators and LLMs quickly turn from a time-saving shortcut to an outright liability. After all, if ChatGPT and other AI models can't be expected to genuinely remember past interactions with them to any reliable, meaningful degree, why should they be trusted to have the reading comprehension skills necessary to consume a script in its entirety and then make judgment calls about terminology, character speaking styles, and many other pressing variables? They simply can't, and if you can't trust them to maintain a working memory of what they're translating as they "translate" it, then it turns out that the better, quicker, and safer option is always, in fact, to turn to a knowledgeable, capable human who can from the outset.
But the concerns about LLMs and MTPEs in fan translation extend well past the immediate practicalities and responsibilities of the work itself. Any discussion of them must also grapple with the reality of how those initial translations are generated. When you as a fan translator take that source material and paste it into something like ChatGPT, you're not merely receiving a one-time output before the technology purges itself of your query. You're feeding the work of creators who toiled months, if not years, into a system that will ingest it, permanently retain it, and disperse it to other users globally without those creators' permission for as long as that system exists. That material, which was never yours and will never belong to you, is, by extension, not yours to effectively donate to the (aspiring) profit engines of Sam Altman and his ilk. While permission in general might be relative when it comes to fan translation, what is absolutely indisputable is who owns the work being built upon and it certainly isn't the fan translation teams engaging in this behavior.
Having almost certainly seen my work fed into generative AI by at least one renowned client by my count, I can say that I don't spend those long nights playing Japanese builds of games (sometimes at breakneck pace for prolonged periods), writing dialogue, and troubleshooting problems with my colleagues just to have those same clients turn around and ask a computer to produce a limp facsimile of my writing in a brazen investment grab. Is that client legally allowed to do so because they own the copyright to my translations? Yes, but it doesn't change the fact that I put in the time, effort, and quality that I do for the games themselves, for their developers, and for their players, not for a technology whose stated end goal is to make me redundant in the eyes of employers. And while I can't speak for the teams behind the games now receiving MTPE-based patches, I can't imagine they crunched and made sacrifices in their lives during development just to have their work served up on a platter to an objectifying, averaging, muddying algorithm, either, least of all those whose games have waited decades to make their international break. None of those individuals slept under their desks or were hospitalized so that a small group of people on the Internet many thousands of miles away could enjoy a hit of clout at their expense for but a fleeting moment.
For many game developers and other creatives in Japan, the extent of their impact on the world such as they see and feel it doesn't extend beyond the archipelago. Even acclaimed, globally celebrated individuals can go their entire careers and enter retirement feeling wholly anonymous, never even imagining an audience spanning oceans and continents. It may not be until a foreign fan reaches them, and especially in their own language, that they understand their work did travel abroad and make a difference well beyond their homeland. In my own experience, "white foreigner with a penchant for retro dating sims that time forgot" can make for a surprisingly quick and potent ice-breaker when introducing yourself in the right circles, it turns out.
As a translator who will never be contractually allowed to reveal the bulk of my work with the world, it's this kind of life spent in obscurity, one that has a way of minimizing your self-worth from a lack of recognition, that causes me to feel a deep, knowing sadness when I see yet another fan effort needlessly succumb to the siren calls of MTPE-tinted machine translations. Beyond the practicality of the whole exercise, beyond the ethics and morals of churning through material in that particular way, is a group of people whose efforts made and prices paid we'll never know.
Were they taken care of?
Were they taken advantage of?
Were they bled dry?
Did they watch life pass them by?
Were they happy to do it all anyway?
Or was it all they could do to get their pay?
We'll never know. All I do know is, when what remains of that is taken out of human hands, no matter for how long or how little, they and their legacies are condemned to their own vault, their chance of escape vanishingly little. Only a person can make a translation that respects and reveres the humanity imparted upon this earth. Either you do this for the love of the games themselves and the people behind them, or for the love of yourself. There is no line to be drawn down the middle.
2026-06-19 18:12:00
I grew up in a Catholic family in Boston. As you can imagine, this was an especially Catholic upbringing.
I loved being religious. For my first communion, my grandmother gave me a gold cross on a gold chain. I would kiss the cross before walking up to the plate at my little league baseball games, feeling the grooves of the gum I’d packed in my lip with my tongue to settle my nerves against a familiar texture.
At night, in the room I shared with my two brothers, I’d sit crosslegged on the gray carpet next to my bed and say an Our Father. I’d ask for stuff. I’d ask for a good grade on a test or that a certain girl would talk to me the next day at school, and that when I talked back, I’d be funny and I’d say exactly the right thing. I’d pray that there would be no more hunger or pain or other bad things in the world. I felt like someone cared about me, and was looking out for me, and that there was an underlying order and justice to the universe.
I liked praying and I liked sitting in the thin wooden pews in church on Sunday mornings. I liked following my mind wherever it wandered, only occasionally interrupted by the priest telling me to stand/sit/kneel. I liked the organ, which sounded scary, and the singer, who had a cartoonishly high-pitched, unsteady, grating voice. I liked how the light came in through the high windows behind the altar, which was covered in a heavy purple sheet. After church, we’d drive through nice neighborhoods with big houses. My parents would ogle and guess at how much each was worth while the four of us kids tried to keep our knees from touching in the backseat.
Our church could loosely be classed as ‘fire and brimstone’, though I’m sure there were more doomer-y ones out there. The priests talked about hell a ton. It kinda seemed like you could be sent there for just about anything. I thought about it all the time. I knew I lied, and I knew I wanted the wrong things. I wanted to be a famous skateboarder. I wanted money and I wanted ten girlfriends. I was not meek and I would not inherit the earth. I liked to fight and I liked to eat as much as I could at dinner, even though there were kids who never had anything for dinner.
My freshman year of college I joined a poetry club. As you can imagine, I arrived incredibly naive and insulated from disparate perspectives. I met a bunch of people there who were quite different from me. These were not the aloof, rough boys of my youth lol. It occurred to me for the first time in a meaningful way that the doctrine I’d been steeping in my entire life was wrong.
I now looked at my religion as punitive, irrationally vindictive, egocentric, naive, deeply prejudicial, and frequently hypocritical about important things. It was suddenly clear to me that many of the tenets of Catholicism were the machinations of mortal men trying to keep women subservient and self-subjugating and the poor delusional with hope, such that neither group would try to change their circumstances in an organized or decisive way.
I functionally abandoned Catholicism, though I didn’t tell my family and so still went to church when I was home from school. I didn’t mind going at all and still enjoyed the ritual.
Until very recently, I’ve thought very little about organized religion apart from generally disliking it for all the unresolvable conflict it tends to generate. I’ve never minded one way or the other if friends of mine are religious, but I’ve always known it ran counter to my own value system.
But now I’m having a kid. I’ve been thinking about the comforts of religion that did serve me at one time, and whether or not I should make those comforts available to him somehow.
I think there are several benefits of being part of some organized spiritual group. You have community, a clear-cut moral code or general design for living, rituals that serve as grounding tentpoles across the long lawn of childhood, and some kind of answer for the hard problem of ‘why’ that is extremely palatable for kids.
That said, there is no way we are going to adopt the Catholicism I grew up in. It would be way too confusing for him. We’d be telling him, on the one hand, every person has innate dignity and deserves compassion and respect, and also God loves all his children, but on the other hand, gay people are on a fast train to hell for some reason, where they’ll burn for all eternity, and so is anyone who doesn’t atone in a very specific way for the inherent sin of being born human at all.
Life is full of contradictions no matter how you look at it, but IMO that’s a bit too contradictory. So I’ve been thinking about other forms of spirituality/community/rituals that could provide a grounding framework for my little growing family.
My wife works in hospice and many of her coworkers/friends are spiritual guides of one kind or another: there are rabbis, chaplains, reiki masters, priests, death doulas, you name it. Whoever you might need at the end of your life, should you need a spiritual guide at all.
She grew up vaguely ‘Christian’ but never went to church or anything like that. She doesn’t seem to have any religious baggage, but her parents believed in the Christian God and by extension she did too, albeit very passively. However, now that our son is nearly here, she has said she wishes she had more to hang on to as a kid re: ‘why are we here’, ‘what is the point’, ‘what is death’, etc. Perhaps this is typical of innately curious kids, who knows.
On Sunday I went and visited a rabbi at a local synagogue to talk about all this. I met her through my wife’s work and she’s chill/smart. After a far-reaching, invigorating hour of intellectual sparring and answering my questions with questions, she basically said ‘you guys should just do whatever you want.’
She told me to read this book about the history of Tarot, which I will do. Apparently it started as a card game, and then it evolved into a way to gamble, and then a kind of cult formed around it, and then it finally morphed into the source material for divination rituals.
The ‘moral’ of our discussion was that ‘spirituality’ can be anything. It’s just a vector for faith, which we all have a mysterious compulsion to express. We love being devoted to something alongside others who get it.
She advised I go to a gathering of Wiccans that meets in a major city near my suburb, so I’m going to do that and report back. I’m going to check out a bunch of different organized spiritual groups, including a Unitarian church in my town. My friend’s wife is Catholic and says she knows of one of those woke, more upbeat Catholic churches, so I’ll check that out, too.
The likely result of all this sampling is that we opt not to explicitly belong to any one group, but that me and my wife figure out what kind of ‘answers’ are palatable and sensible for children who ask about ‘the big picture’.
Re: what I’ll tell my son. Well, nothing much for a while. He’ll be a baby. But soon, when he becomes curious about the world - why it’s here, what happens later, if there’s anywhere he can go to deliberate these questions, I’ll tell him about all the organized religions and all the disorganized religions, and all the versions of those answers made available to us through science/math/physics, and let him follow his nose.
Of course, the rabbi asked what I believe in when we were talking in her office. I said I believe in people, and the constant, improbable, latent possibility for good in the world.
2026-06-19 06:59:00
I wear my favorite perfumes and body sprays at home. I used to try to save them for when I went out on a nice date or attended an upscale Event, then I realized I was hardly getting any use out of them. What good is it doing me to have bought pretty-smelling sprays if I just put them on a shelf and never wear them?
So now, I wear them while I work from home. I spray perfume or body spray on myself after showering, and if I can't smell it on myself anymore around lunchtime, I spray some more. I sit at my desk in a comfy t-shirt and shorts, smelling so nice with my fancy sprays that it brings a smile to my face.
My current favorite body spray has me smelling like a refreshing, bright, juicy grapefruit.
2026-06-19 05:36:00
When you feel overwhelmed, slow down.
I know this might feel like the exact opposite thing your system wants to do when you feel overwhelmed. But it's not...
What if the feeling we associate with overwhelm is actually a message, sent by our system, asking us to please slow down?
And what if the negative outcomes we associate with feeling overwhelmed are actually a result of ignoring that message—of working harder and faster and more frantically instead?
I have a saying I throw at my children almost daily: haste makes waste. It's obnoxious, but it's true.
Most injuries to our body, to our relationships, to our mental and emotional health, come from rushing. Not from going too fast, but from going faster than we actually want to go.
Picture a runner who loves to run. They're running fast and loving it. That is fast, not rushing.
Now picture someone who is running faster than they want to run. They're running away. They're not in pace with their own self. Part of them is behind, and part is ahead.
This is how we injure ourselves—we literally fracture ourselves when we rush.
When I wake up in the morning and I feel overwhelmed, my habitual response is to react by getting rid of that feeling as fast as possible. This ends up hurting me. So I've learned over time to hate the feeling of overwhelm. But it's not the feeling of overwhelm that causes me pain—it's my reaction to it. I shoot the messenger and end up hurting myself.
The solution is not to get rid of the feeling of overwhelm; it's to change our relationship with it, and our response to it.
How do we do this? I believe the answer is to slow down, and listen.
I feel overwhelmed right now. What is this feeling trying to say to me?
It may be saying something like: "I'm scared." "I can't do this." "It's too much."
Is that the voice of someone who needs to be gotten rid of?
Do you see the opportunity in this?
Normally, we jump to reaction: "It's fine." "You're fine." "Stop complaining." "You just need to work faster and harder."
Is that the voice we want to embody?
That reaction is like noticing the low-gas light turn on in our car, and immediately slamming on the gas to try to get where we're going before the fuel runs out. It only leads to an empty tank. Burnout.
The opportunity is to slow down and listen. To pull over and to tend to the need. It is crying out from the body: "This is too much for me!"
How would it look to really hear this message? To honor the messenger?
The feeling of overwhelm is an opportunity—to come back. To reconnect with ourselves as we are.
Like it or not, our self has limitations. And like it or not, these limitations come in waves that are beyond our control. But the reverse is also true: our strength also comes in waves. It takes a tremendous amount of trust to move with the waves—to honor them rather than to fight them.
This is hard because it forces us to accept a potentially terrifying truth: that we are not fully in control. Of even our own self. The waves are in control, not us. That's disconcerting. But it's worth the shift.
If this is our nature, there's no sense in trying to change it. We're not robots. We're living beings. We are made of movement and vibration. We're composed of billions of living, moving cells. Ignoring that sets us up for a lifetime of pointless struggle, trying to control the waves.
But more importantly, this shift puts us on a path that leads us where we actually want to go...
I don't believe we actually want to be perfect, robotic performers. I believe what we actually want is the thing we believe perfection will bring us, which is love. Love from others. Maybe even more than that, love from ourselves. And underneath this desire for love may be an even deeper longing: for rest.
When I know I'm loved, when I love myself, I finally give myself permission to rest. To breathe, to see, and to enjoy.
And that may be our deepest longing of all: we long for joy.
We will never find joy by dehumanizing and perfecting ourselves.
We won't find joy by shaming ourselves for feeling the way we feel.
We won't find joy by pushing and rushing ourselves to always be somewhere we're not...
We will only find love, rest, and joy here. And now.
We can skip all the requirements and all the should's, and move straight to love, rest, and joy—by just being here, where we are.
The irony is that once we begin to allow ourselves to be where we are—to feel and receive the love, rest, and joy that are always available to us—the circumstances we thought would get us there often end up happening on their own. Or they don't. Either way it's fine, because we already have what we wanted all along.
At the end of the day, the most important thing of all may be that a voice deep inside us finally got to be heard.
2026-06-19 02:53:55
I started coding about 20 years, about 14 years old, learning HTML & CSS on W3Schools to customize my MySpace.
Since then, I've done Android and iOS development, frontend web development (including Javascript), and a hell of a lot of backend web development (with PHP). I've also done some BASH scripting and made several developer tools written in PHP.
I've loved programming for a long time. It has felt like a thing that I need to do. Its part passion, part obsession, part I want to make actually useful things.
It may just be a slump I'm in, but I feel that fire dying within me.
I was working on a tool recently that would help me scrape websites. I have two use-cases in mind. one is to scrape Trackmania track records so that I can see when my Author Times are beaten on maps that I've made, and also to watch for when a streamer plays one of my maps (so I can go watch them discover it). The other use-case is to scrape local news websites to build a search database of just local news.
I started this Scraper-tool a week or two ago (or a month? idr), and I was fairly excited by it. Then I got on to work on it yesterday. I made notes about the direction the project should go ... and I made twice as many notes about how its probably just not worth my time.
First of all, there are already free & open source tools for scraping websites. But I like building my own things! Especially since I have specific use-cases in mind and am not sure how much shopping I need to do to a find a tool that I can finegle to do exactly what I want.
Second of all, I'm mentally disabled. I can work on my projects for 1-2 hours at a time ... every once in awhile. If I could work 8 hour days, or even 4 hour days, this project would be finished and excellent within a week, maybe two. But because of my limitation, this project could take literal months to complete. I have other more important projects that call for my attention, since my ability to work is so limited.
Third, mother fucking Generative AI.
Much of the software I've built over the last 7 years has been ... stuff to make it easier to developer software in-general (tool to generate documentation, tool to manage databases, etc) & stuff to make it easier to develop websites.
I've made some really great things. I've made some shitty things. And I have some projects that are getting close to being amazing, though they aren't quite there YET.
I've always had the concern of ... well ... there's already competing products that do things almost as well as my software will do them. I could use the off-the-shelf software to build my websites. But frankly, that just doesn't satisfy my passions, an I'm all-in on the sunk-cost fallacy. I'm also just really proud of my work and I want to see where it goes.
But now with AI. Just what's the fucking point? I always wanted these tools to be used by others to make it easier for people to develop software they care about. But in the age of AI, especially as it gets better at generating code, the utility of my potentially-better-software just ... isn't there.
I've had many bouts before with "What's the point?" But its feeling different this time.
I think if not for my disability, I would feel quite differently.
And maybe its my mood. I'm a little burnt out right now. Something I'm struggling to address because if I really take a day to rest, I just get bored and antsy and then feel like I need to do stuff. And then doing stuff is exhausting.
But maybe I'll feel differently when my mood has leveled back out. Maybe.
2026-06-18 23:46:34
I heard on the news today that monasteries here in Sweden are seeing increased interest from young people. They are curious about the monastery life and seeking answers to whether there's more to their own lives than what they currently experience.
Why this trend?
Who knows, but it wouldn't be too far-fetched a guess to say it's at least to some extent related to today's connected society. Notifications, likes, comments, sharing, tracking everything, endless entertainment at your fingertips 24/7, always updated...
Swipe and you'll have the answer to anything served. But that's not quite true, is it?
No search engine or AI model will be able to answer the questions that are most important on a personal level: the existential ones.
Who am I? What's my calling in life? How do I fit into all this?
It's like the closer we get to obtaining superficial information, the further we drift from the deeper answers.
When the Swedish monk Björn Natthiko Lindeblad was giving talks, he often quoted Winnie the Pooh:
Piglet: "Owl knows so much!"
Pooh: "Yes, and that's probably why he understands so little."
We've become owls. Knowing without understanding.
Whoo-Whoo-Whooooo am I?