© Michel Heitzmann - Humans nowhere

Sunday night. JFK to Heathrow. Business class because McKinsey paid. Well, the client did.

I discovered the disruptive genius of Richard Branson and his Virgin Atlantic that allowed me to collect little mag lights and other useless cool things.

I should have been sleeping though. I was reading the deck I had written for the morning meeting.

In that meeting, one of them would ask a question I had not anticipated, and I did not want to go oh shit.

It would probably be a hurtful “so what?”

I always dreaded that so-what that often was accompanied by a think-better condescending encouragement. Wait! I still hate it just remembering it.

Suffering to stay at the table.

It was McKinsey after all: some folks still think I am some kind of brilliant outlier when I mention I have endured it for five years.

The table. In an old St James building in London with gorgeous wood everywhere, astonishing staircases and in the basement, a whole bunch of folks speaking English in accents I had never heard before and making charts in a pre-PowerPoint world out of the handwritten pages we gave them.

The wanna see Buckingham Palace? it is a 2 minute walk type of table.

Around it, people who had gone to Oxford, Cambridge, INSEAD, Wharton, Harvard, LSE. I was just an engineer from Columbia, having to learn every day what the rest already knew. A guy spelled Michelle by most, in the Anglo-Saxon consulting temple. Mentioning spell it like Platini only worked in Europe. Gringos went Uh? Ok, call me Mike. No, am straight.

During those Branson weekly collector treats, I lived in Connecticut. Sunday night I flew mostly to London, Friday afternoon I flew back to New York, in between I worked eighteen-hour days in a city I did not live in for a Firm whose current members experience the same as I did. I know. I talk to them during the annual get-togethers.

Now, I smile and listen to them like dinosaurs do.

Yet, I wonder if I deserved to be there.

I mean it. It ain’t charming humility for the LinkedIn crowd although that crowd should be humbler when they claim to be humbled by a mundane experience we do not care about.

The people around that table were, on average, more experienced than I was, better networked than I was, spoke way better English and certainly less shy.

I had infiltrated it through compounding effort, and the effort had to keep compounding because the moment it stopped, the gap would show.

Once I let myself say it out loud, even now, decades later, I have to ask what I was doing all those years with my sweaty palms.

I was fuelled by the fear of being found out. Imposter syndrome à son maximum.

I was performing competence. Reasonably well.

Yet, the only response to a body that knows it does not belong is to work twice as hard as anyone else in the room, indefinitely, until some collapse happens.

Le mécanisme is not that weird, as I see it now.

Monday and Tuesday go fine. The dinner on Wednesday goes fine. Thursday’s call goes fine. Friday I fly home and Saturday I do not move from the sofa and Sunday at six o’clock I start packing again. Each one a hit. Just frequent enough to keep me at the table for another week. Not really a win. Just a not yet.

Today I roam airports and I notice all these important folks, talking important things, very loud if they are Americans, that nobody else cares about.

I see the me of decades ago. Now I admit it is far more important how Arsenal is doing or how the planet is not doing.

For those still out there conquering the world, you, not Elon, who is past help, well, it is an illusion.

Let’s talk again about the madman who studied pigeons to then extrapolate to humans.

Skinner did the experiments in 1957. Pigeons that get fed every time peck at a steady rate and stop when they are full. Pigeons that get fed sometimes, unpredictably, peck until they fall over. The intermittent reward is the addictive one. The intermittent absence of exposure is the same shape.

I made it through this one too. That was what I thought. Whispered in a hotel bathroom in Frankfurt at midnight. Whispered in a taxi from Heathrow at six in the morning. Whispered to myself across years.

Not found out. Pretending. Well.

Allow me to go down history lane to a dinner party in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1917, i.e. way before I was born. I have researched this.

A shy young army officer, raised by his grandparents after both parents walked out, sat awkwardly at every dinner table he had ever sat at.

Someone passes him a cocktail. Then another. By the end of the evening he is drunk for the first time in his life, and feels for the first time in his life, that he belongs. The elixir of life. The drink had done the one thing he had spent his whole life wishing for.

William Griffith Wilson spent the next seventeen years drinking himself to ruin. Failed law school as he was too drunk to pick up his diploma. Made and lost a fortune speculating in stocks. Was committed four times to hospitals. The doctor there eventually told his wife that he would either die of his alcoholism or have to be locked up permanently because his brain was going. Bill W. had his last drink on 11 December 1934.

Since I know the date, you are figuring out that the man did something exceptional. Stay with me.

Six months later, on a failed business trip to Akron, Bill W. found himself in a hotel lobby on a Saturday afternoon. Six months sober. At the end of the lobby was the bar. Through the door he could see men laughing (different times, women were doing other things).

He had figured out that the only thing keeping him sober was talking to another drunk. He could not stay sober by himself.

So instead of walking into the bar, he walked to the lobby telephone and started calling names from the church directory on a side table. He was not calling to confess. He was not calling to pray. After many calls, a minister, instead of doing what ministers usually do, said: I know a drunk.

The drunk was Robert Smith, a surgeon in Akron whose hands shook in the morning. They talked for six hours on first meeting. Dr Bob took his last drink on the 10th of June 1935.

Alcoholics Anonymous dates its founding to that day. Today, almost two million members worldwide. No app. No notifications. No streaks. No algorithm. No status.

Everyone is a first name and an initial. The anonymity is not coincidence. It is the architecture. The whole thing is built so a stockbroker can sit beside a surgeon beside a janitor beside a senator and none of it matters. The only fact in the room is whether you can stay sober today.

It works because step one is non-negotiable: admit you are powerless over alcohol.

That sentence is doing all the work. Not admit you have a chemical dependency. Not admit you have an illness. Admit you cannot win against this. The fight is the addiction. The admission is the exit.

The genius of step one, the part that the wellness industry has never been able to copy and never will, is that it makes room for the possibility that the shame was correct. That you had, in fact, ruined things. Hurt people. Failed at marriages. Lost jobs. Made promises you did not keep. Step one does not tell you the verdict was unfair. Step one tells you the verdict is allowed to be true, and the only way forward is to stop arguing with it.

How does this relate to my London story? I craved acceptance and recognition preventing me from being the charming person I am today.

I reckon that most humans not just surviving are in the same boat. Performing and blinded from being themselves. Not paying attention to the important things.

Which brings me to the apps I built for those who are spinning wheels.

I built three. They are on iOS and Android. They are free. They have no notifications. They have no streaks. They have no algorithm. They do not remember nor remind you. You have to remember them.

They are useless to someone who has not yet admitted what their schedule is doing to them.

They gather dust until the day you decide you do not want to be at that table on those terms any more. That day may not come. For most people it does not. The apps will be deleted in a storage cleanup along with the photo editor you used once in 2022.

This is not a roadmap bug. This is the stance. A tool that nags you is the table in a different costume. I refused to build that. Which means I have built something that will fail. I know.

I built it anyway. With money I earned at the exact table I am now writing against.

Somebody will find them at the right moment. Maybe six people. Maybe six thousand. That is a sketchy business case. But then again, it is not pretending to be business.

Like you, I use AI every day and it is the Red Bull without the stomach ache. That thing lets me actually connect dots when before I was just attempting or talking about it.

And now it is also at the table.

The hours AI saves on a deck are not given back. They are spent on the next task. The week a strategy team used to spend thinking is now three prompts. The output looks like thinking. It is the absence of thinking.

I coach in organisations now. I watch this happen in real time. My gut, every week now, is to ask: could you please be human? Could you please think?

Less and less time is dedicated to thinking let alone pause.

The new question at the table is no longer did you do the work but did you do it faster than the person across from you who has learned to prompt better. The table has not gone away. The table appears to have more chairs and I fear that soon it will become musical chairs. Disappearing like those guys in the basement.

The way out of this madness is admitting the gap may never close on someone else’s terms.

And then search for somewhere else on your terms.

Wait! Are you reading this at work?

Did AI just do what you were hired for?

Am not monetising. The apps are free. They do one thing: clear the noise so you can hear yourself, hear others, hear the planet. iOS and Android. thequietframe.com/app.

Thanks for reading.

Share The Quiet Frame

© Michel Heitzmann - Tight for some of that day but not for Mbappé: 4 x 2

A friend called me today. Sharp as a cutter, he analysed what I have been writing and wanted to agree on a label.

Stoicism, he said. Or minimalism. Or slow living. Maybe meditation.

Labels are reference points and they’re also dangerous, as in foreigner. None of them.

Stoicism is endurance. Marcus Aurelius taking the blow and controlling the reaction. I am not teaching anyone to suffer the casino better. I am naming the casino. And I admit that normally I yell back when blown.

Minimalism is aesthetic monasticism. Capsule wardrobes and Apple stores and a single rock on a beige cover. There is a saucisson on my porch and a moquette bordeaux in a village council. Not minimal. Specific but yes, beautiful it must be!

Slow living is a brand. Linen, sourdough, a farmhouse in Provence shot through a soft filter. I am not selling pace. I am naming theft and love to drive fast and I can’t afford a place in Provence. And France is so complicated.

Meditation is the most respected of the wrong labels. It deserves more than a line. So I will give it three.

Senegal. Last May. On my back, on a beach, in a group. There was a method. Close your eyes. Follow the instructions. Breathe in this rhythm. You will reach a different state.

I closed my eyes for about twelve seconds. Then I went rebel.

I opened them.

The sky over Senegal at night is all the constellations a meter away. So many stars that the dark between them stops being the main thing. The oxygenation was doing something to me and the stars started moving. They became meteors. Every one of them. The whole sky in motion above me.

That night taught me three things.

The first is that disobeying orders has its benefits although I knew that.

The second is why I had to chase meteors with a camera a week ago, on a Vaud hillside with two dogs at 4am, lens up at the Lyrids.

The third is bigger. The method had told me to shut one sense down to find peace. I found something better by leaving them all on. The breath. The sand under my back. The sound of the ocean. The smell of the air. The sky moving above me. All of them at once as tears rolled down my cheeks. Not sadness as Mick Jagger would ballad us some decades ago with As Tears Go By. But out of fulfilment. It’s only rock’n’roll but i like it.

Symphony of senses.

© Michel Heitzmann - Captain America in Senegal

That is the state. Not meditation. Not silence. Not detox. The senses are what connect us to what is actually there. Why shut one off?

And memory joins the symphony. A scent reminds you of a place. A sound brings back a face. The senses do not work alone and they do not work only in the present. Memory is the add-on the gurus forget to mention.

The Amazon, some months later. Dawn in the jungle.

I went up a mirador before the first rays. It was not quiet at all but a cacophony of sounds going from the familiar to electric saws. All from insects.

Then the next layer turns on. Then the next. By the time the light arrives the volume is already at full. Some insects go quiet but the drums and cymbals come in. Water dripping somewhere off a leaf. Wind moving through three different heights of canopy at once. Heat starting on the skin before it reaches the air. A rustle that could be a snake, a monkey or wind. And the soprano of the birds.

There is no method available. There is no posture. There is no monk. Nor a bell. You either notice or you miss it.

The Amazon does not teach you a practice. It refuses to be ignored. It is a fairly scary place unless you are with someone who knows what not to touch or step. The only ecosystem on the planet that does not let anybody single-channel it.

Full symphony of senses required for pale face here.

© Michel Heitzmann - One of the rustles

This evening, Bassins. As I write. Dogs fed.

The nice birds (not the Russell Crowe ones doing Ragnarök duty in the garden all year round) came back some weeks ago and they have been multiplying. There are more of them every morning. They start before visible dawn and go non-stop for some fourteen hours. It is not a soundtrack. It is several conversations happening at once that do not need me as the third party.

This is not silence. Silence is absence. Silence is what people imagine when they say they want to get away from it all.

This is quietly beautiful. Which is a different word entirely.

The casino is loud. The forest is loud. They are not the same kind of loud. One is a hijack. The other is a philharmonic. The casino wants you to keep one channel open and starve the others. The philharmonic wants nothing from you. It just plays a symphony to be enjoyed.

The practice (and I have to stop calling it a practice in a minute) is recognising the difference.

My friend wanted a label. I have been resisting one. So let me tell you why.

There is no method.

I do nothing special. I am just aware.

A practice implies discipline. A protocol. Something you have to do. Sit on a cushion. Breathe in counts. Journal in the morning. Track your streaks. The whole wellness industry sells practices. Apps with notifications, programs with weeks, coaches with frameworks, retreats with menus, people with non-Western names often dressed in statements.

What I am describing is not that. It is the removal of everything that prevents the senses from doing their job. The senses come back online when you stop drowning them. There is nothing to learn. There is everything to stop doing.

The method was the noise.

This is also why the professor in Week 1 could not believe my essay. He had a method for what good writing looked like. I had no method. I just wrote. The village council in Week 2 had a method for governance. I had no method. I just paid attention to what was happening. The saucisson in Week 6 is the method. The casino in Week 7 is the method. Method is what they sell you. Awareness is what they take.

Now I can hear the next question coming. Because the moment you say there is no method, you are filed under a different shelf.

You know the shelf. Every bookstore has it. It sits between Self-Help and Cooking. The covers are all beige. Half of them have a single rock on them. The other half have a single feather. Several have a single Buddha but with the face slightly turned away as if even he is bored.

Apparently if you say there is no path, you are Zen. If you say be here now, you are Buddhist. If you sit very still and watch, you are a contemplative Christian. Or worse. If you do all three with a friend, you have started a cult.

Krishnamurti said there is no path to find truth. He then spent a life giving talks about the path of no path. I say truth is a perception to explore but then I am only an engineer.

Tony Parsons says there is no one to wake up. He then sells stadiums.

Je pense donc je suis et je t’emmerde.

Sartre was partially right. Hell is other people telling you who you are. And who you should be.

I am not picking on them. I am noting that the moment you say there is no method, you have started one. The book you write to explain there is no book becomes a book. This is the trap. The Quiet Frame will fall into it the moment I let it.

Which brings me to the part where I should be capitalising on all this.

Probably I should come up with a better name. Start a practice. Do the TED talk. Found a sect. Ask for money. Or just rob à la evangelist. Build a following. Write ten books that are the same book. Get on the beige shelf between the rock and the feather, perhaps with a mirror on the cover.

Full disclosure. The last time I opened Descartes or Sartre was at school. Immensely boring for a teenager. I much preferred Catcher in the Rye and Brave New World. Read forty-five years ago in French. English was not yet on the menu. Holden taught me what to refuse.

And inspired me to walk through Central Park later as a survival-Spanish-speaking student in New York, where the guy behind the counter from Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic kept asking me to choose between white, whole-wheat, sourdough, French, rye, marble rye, pumpernickel. I would point a finger and then he would do it again with the cold cuts. Pastrami, corned beef, capicola, bologna, liverwurst. And once more with the cheese, where Swiss meant something that had holes and tasted like plastic.

Neither of us knew what most of those were. I still do not know. And I do not care.

Huxley taught me what was being built. I never ventured into Krishnamurti or Parsons. I ran a search to write this up. The trick is well documented. Wikipedia is a generous host. Please do not query me at a party about any of this. Unless I have signal on my phone.

I am not making any money on this.

The other path is unethical, boring and idiotic. Pick two and I might consider it.

A friend asked me what to call it.

Nothing special. I am just aware.

If there must be a name (and apparently there must, because the brain wants a folder for everything) I have been typing it all this time. On the URL. In the apps. In the sign-off of every piece. In the journal he had been reading from when he wrote to me.

The Quiet Frame.

Not a doctrine. A stance.

A frame is a choice about what enters. Quiet is what is left when the noise stops competing for the centre. The Quiet Frame is what you do when you stop letting the casino, the salami, the professor, the village council, the screen, the algorithm, the method, the brand, the sect, the ten books, the rock and the feather all reach in at once.

It translates better than I expected. Le cadre tranquille. In French cadre also means executive. A quiet pun on forty years I spent inside companies that designed the slices. A moldura quieta. Painting, picture, scene, all at once.

It is small on purpose. Symphony of senses. Memory included.

Shut up. Listen. Touch. See. Smell. Taste.

We are alive. That is the whole thing.

And then.

I imagine the day when I see something. I take a photo because there is beauty even in ugly scenes or the unnoticed. I come home. I put it on the wall. Not to show off. To keep seeing it. To let it stay long enough to understand what it meant to me. Not buried in 32,149 photos some algorithm will order for me, and probably misorder, given it can’t know me as I don’t know myself.

On the wall.

Not in a futuristic Tom Cruise way. The old fashioned way. Earning the space on the wall to become the quiet frame, my quiet frame, that day.

There must be a simpler way to do this.

Am not monetising. Perhaps yet. The apps are free and they do one thing: clear the noise so you can hear yourself, hear others, hear the planet.

Go to thequietframe.com. Download. Write back.

I am also thankful to another friend who reached out looking for an article from a few weeks back. I also struggled to find it. Until I went to journal.thequietframe.com. It is all there.

Thanks for reading.

Share The Quiet Frame

© Michel Heitzmann - On the bus prior to the Grand Prix

Quel bordel. Non, plutôt un casino

Não, mãe. A vida deixou de ser uma caixa de bombons

Run, Forrest, run. And his sweet Mama and the box of chocolates.

I have been there. In casinos.

Campione d’Italia, on the lake. Las Vegas. Some island in the Caribbean whose name I have decided not to remember. Monaco.

I never won.

Not once. Not at blackjack, not at roulette, not at the slot machines I tried for twenty minutes in the Caribbean because James Bond apparently never played slot machines and I wanted to know why. I do now.

I walked into each of them the way every man my age walked in. With the dinner jacket of the imagination on, and the soundtrack playing in the head, and the fantasy that this was the room where the interesting version of me was finally going to show up. James Bond. The chips. The Martini. The woman across the table.

What I got was three hours, free drinks, and a lighter wallet.

That is the deal. Always was. Casinos do not sell games. They sell a costume you put on at the door and take off in the cab home. The Martini is on the house because the math is on the house.

The casino has a very long memory and no sense of mercy.

The thing about a casino, the thing that takes you twenty years to notice if you notice at all, is that it has no clocks. No windows. The carpet is thick so your footsteps disappear. The oxygen is pumped, slightly enriched, depending on the establishment and the decade. The drinks are free because a man who is drinking is a man who has lost his ability to reason. The dealer is friendly because friendliness is the only product the house gives you for free.

You do not walk out. You are extracted. By the dawn, by your wife, by your wallet, or by a polite man in a dark suit who has been watching you since the moment you sat down.

The slot machine was invented in 1898 by a mechanic named Charles (né August “Gus”, rather geboren) Fey, in San Francisco. Variable rewards. Three reels. Gum and coins. No operator. No patent because gambling was illegal in California.

The behavioural science behind it was not understood for another sixty years in 1957. B(urrhus) F. Skinner of Harvard enjoyed mistreating pigeons and rats.

He found that if you reward a pigeon every time it pecks a button, it pecks at a steady rate. If you reward it sometimes, randomly, it pecks faster. If you reward it almost never, but unpredictably, it pecks until it falls over. Charming.

Mr President did not read the paper but is conducting his own experiments with new pigeons.

Kevin Systrom read the paper in 2010 and came up with Instagram.

He offers the following advice: learn enough to be dangerous. Thanks Kev. Same stuff. Now in my pocket.

Zhang Yiming over in Beijing, tried once, merged twice and we have been dancing the TikTok bytes ever since. Have you seen the sweet commercials on UK tv about the girl that aces her exam because she studied on TikTok? How could you possibly not be on TikTok?

It is so good that it ceased to be a national security issue as they say it comes up with votes.

Zhang outdid Kevin by a factor of 30 according to Forbes and has now some 60 billion. Who cares about the currency.

Three iterations. The first one took our coins. The second one took our pigeons and rats off the street. The third took us.

I have not been in a casino for decades.

But I have been in a casino every day for three weeks at my own desk.

No clocks. No windows. The dogs are the carpet. The screens are the dealer. The recognition is the jackpot the house keeps dangling, and I have been hitting it just often enough, for thirty years, to keep me in the building. I have built three ventures and now an object on my desk on this engine. The engine works. The casino is the engine.

Anything that captures complete attention is a casino.

This is the part that should have been obvious to me sooner. The phone is a casino. Everyone knows. We have all read the article. We have all underlined the same paragraph. We have all kept scrolling.

My build is a casino. A grudge is a casino. A renovation is a casino. A relationship you cannot stop performing is a casino. A divorce, especially a slow one, is a casino (from experience with only one loser, me).

No clocks. No windows. Variable rewards. The house always wins because the house is selling time and you are paying in life.

Most of the people we know are sitting at their own table, in their own windowless room, and no one is selling them anything. They are dealing to themselves.

My Saturday version, since you were about to ask.

I walk into the living room at nine. The kids are home.

AM BUSY! I must do MY thing. I remember three small wins on the build between ten and one, the kind that make you put another chip on the table. I remember the dogs at some point and a thing I cooked for them, briefly, between three screens.

I looked up around three.

I was alone with the dogs. I had won three small things on the build. I was still in the building. Ignoring the view, the kids.

© Michel Heitzmann - The view I ignore

The charming dealer in the carpet-matching burgundy vest was not there because in this casino, I was her. And it hit me, my loss.

I never saw a James Bond pay for his shaken not stirred.

You also do not have to pay. There is a reason, pigeon.

What casino are you in?

We are all sitting at a table somewhere. Most of us did not pick the room. I built The Quiet Frame to help us notice the carpet, the oxygen, the missing clocks. It takes a couple of minutes a day, in the other direction. I’m not sure it works on me yet. But it might work on you. Free on Apple and Android, links at thequietframe.com/app.

Thanks for reading.

Share The Quiet Frame

© Michel Heitzmann - Circuit en bus, avant le Grand Prix

Note de style. Le français est une langue que trop aiment compliquer. Habitant à Paris, j’ai entendu, je n’écoutais pas, des tournures magnifiques, des phrases interminables, des discours ennuyeux. Franchement, c’est insupportable. Avec mes ados, nous parlons simple et à l’horreur de ma mère utilisons putain comme une ponctuation ou une pause pensante.

The Quiet Frame est ce que j’ai construit quand j’ai arrêté de lever la main. thequietframe.com

J’y suis allé. Enfin, dans les casinos.

Campione d’Italia, sur le lac. Las Vegas. Divonne. Monaco. Une île aux Caraïbes dont j’ai décidé d’oublier le nom.

J’ai jamais gagné.

Pas une seule fois. Ni au blackjack, ni à la roulette, ni aux machines à sous que j’ai essayées vingt minutes aux Caraïbes parce que James Bond joue jamais aux machines à sous et j’voulais comprendre pourquoi. Maintenant je sais.

J’entrais dans chacun de ces palaces comme tout mec qui a vu trop de films. Avec le smoking imaginé sur le dos, la bande-sonore qui tourne dans le crâne, et le fantasme que c’était la version intéressante de moi qui se pointe. James Bond. Les jetons. Le Martini. Les nanas en face. Quel pigeon.

Solde à tous les coups : trois heures, des verres gratuits, et un portefeuille plus léger.

C’est le deal. Ça l’a toujours été. Les casinos vendent pas des jeux. Ils vendent un costume que tu mets à l’entrée et que tu rends en taxi sur le retour. Les Martinis sont offerts parce que l’arithmétique favorise la House.

Le casino a aucune pitié. Quel pigeon.

L’astuce du casino, et ça prend une vingtaine d’années pour la saisir (t’inquiète, je suis aussi con que toi), c’est qu’il y a pas un seul cadran qui te donne l’heure. Pas de fenêtre. La moquette est épaisse pour qu’on entende plus les pas. L’oxygène est pompé, légèrement enrichi, selon l’établissement et la décennie. Les verres sont gratuits parce qu’un mec qui boit est un mec qui sait plus compter. La croupe-pierre (féminin de croupier) est sympa parce que la sympathie est ce que la House t’offre. Et elle espère que tu lui donnes un petit quelque chose avant d’être plumé.

Tu sors pas. On te sort. Par l’aube, par ta femme, par une femme, par ton portefeuille, ou par un mec costaud qui tire sur son costume sombre et qui te regarde depuis que t’es assis.

Un peu d’histoire.

La machine à sous a été inventée en 1898 par un mécano nommé Charles Fey (né August « Gus » Fey chez les chleuhs, ceux d’Allemagne), à San Francisco. Récompenses variables. Trois rouleaux. Du chewing-gum et des pièces en guise de prix. Un truc brillant qui nécessite aucune surveillance et qui créa une vague de chômeurs. Jamais breveté car le hasard fut point Californien. D’ailleurs les jeux le sont toujours pas.

La science du comportement on l’a comprise soixante ans plus tard. Moi, j’ai toujours rien compris mais un certain B(urrhus) F. Skinner s’amusait, à Harvard, à maltraiter pigeons et rats pour que nous puissions saisir que nous nous comportons comme pigeons et rats. C’est génial.

Il a découvert que si tu récompenses un pigeon à tous les coups qu’il allonge son cou pour tapoter un bouton, le chéri tape à un rythme stable. Si tu le récompenses au hasard, il tape plus vite. Si tu le récompenses presque jamais, mais à l’improviste, pauvre pigeon tape jusqu’à tomber. Affreux.

Mais il paraît que c’est toute une science qui nous permet de comprendre comment on survit et surtout comment nous motiver à faire des trucs desquels on a pas forcément envie ou devrait faire. Je vous conseille de dire un mot à vos RH la semaine prochaine.

A noter qu’aujourd’hui, le roi des Amériques, qui n’a pas lu la science de Burrhus, fait ses propres expériences avec ses propres pigeons.

Je poursuis l’exposé.

Kevin Systrom, lui l’a lu en 2010 et a sorti Instagram.

Aujourd’hui, il offre le conseil suivant : learn enough to be dangerous.* Qu’il est charmant. Merci Kev. Maintenant, nous l’avons dans la poche ton machin ou plutôt il nous a empoché.

Zhang Yiming à Pékin, a tenté un coup en 2012, fusionné deux fois, et depuis on danse les bytes de TikTok.

Je sais pas si t’as vu les pubs à la télé récemment. Une adolescente réussit son examen parce qu’elle a révisé sur TikTok. Impossible de se passer de ce bonheur.

Kevin est richissime mais Zhang le défonce par un facteur de 30 car, selon Forbes, il a accumulé 60 milliards. Je me passe de la monnaie car avec ces sommes, peu importe.

En conclusion, l’évolution du phénomène. C’est mon observation et j’ai rien maltraité pour y arriver.

Trois itérations. La première a pris nos sous. La seconde a meurtri nos pigeons et nos rats. La troisième nous a kidnappé.

J’ai pas mis les pieds dans un casino depuis des décennies.

Mais je suis dans un casino tous les jours depuis trois semaines. Chez moi.

Sans heures. Sans fenêtres. Les chiens sont la moquette. Les écrans sont le croupier. Le succès est mon jackpot. J’y suis parvenu assez souvent pour rester dans l’établissement. J’entreprends et là, je bosse sur un truc que tu aimeras (ou pas). J’y suis à fond. C’est mon casino.

J’aurais dû m’apercevoir plus rapidement : ce qui capte notre attention est un casino.

On sait que l’iPhone est le casino de poche. Tout le monde le voit. Non?

Toi qui vas travailler, dans le métro, le train, en voiture. Tous, mais tous avec les yeux rivés sur l’écran. Et nous scrollons* à gauche, à droite, vers le haut ou vers le bas. Avec un pouce si on a l’age, à deux index si on l’a pas.

Les autres casinos ? Un projet. Une rancune. Une rénovation. Une amitié. Un divorce où, par expérience, je perds aussi toujours.

Sans heures. Sans fenêtres. Récompenses variables et au hasard. La House gagne toujours parce qu’elle te vend l’expérience et prend la vie.

En avant, œillères en place.

La plupart de nous sommes attablés, voire vautrés, et consommés par notre truc ou machin. Nous nous croupissons (excellent verbe qui, d’ailleurs, a la même étymologie que croupier, mais, qui signifie tout autre chose).

Et ce samedi ?

Je m’affaire à mon bureau à neuf heures. Mes ados sont à la maison.

SUIS OCCUPÉ ! J’dois faire MON truc. Je me souviens de trois petites victoires sur le projet entre dix heures et une heure, le genre qui te fait remettre des jetons sur la table. Je me souviens des chiens à un moment et des restes que j’ai réchauffé pour le déjeuner (dîner pour les vaudois), vite fait, entre trois écrans. Aussi pour les ados.

J’ai levé les yeux vers trois heures.

J’étais seul avec les chiens. J’empocha trois petits jetons sur le projet. J’étais toujours dans mon casino. À ignorer la vue.

© Michel Heitzmann - La vue ? La voici.

La charmante croupière (j’ai vérifié chez Robert comment l’écrire) en veston bordeaux assorti à la moquette n’était pas là, parce que dans ce casino-là, c’était moi.

J’ai jamais vu un James Bond payer son shaken not stirred.

Toi non plus, t’as pas à payer. Y’a une raison, mon cher pigeon.

C’est quoi ton casino ?

On est tous assis à une table quelque part. La plupart d’entre nous, on n’a pas choisi la pièce. J’ai construit The Quiet Frame* pour qu’on remarque la moquette, l’oxygène, les horloges qui manquent. Ça prend deux minutes par jour, dans l’autre direction. Pas sûr que ça marche encore sur moi. Mais ça marchera peut-être sur toi. Gratuit sur Apple et Android, les liens sur thequietframe.com/app.

Merci de m’avoir lu.

Loi n° 94-665 du 4 août 1994 relative à l’emploi de la langue française, dite loi Toubon. Article 2 : l’emploi de la langue française est obligatoire dans toute publicité écrite, parlée ou audiovisuelle. J’ai choisi de l’ignorer.

Share The Quiet Frame

© Michel Heitzmann - Na condução, pouco antes do grande Prêmio

O português é a fala da minha infância, adolescência, de alguns anos de trabalho e de grandes amizades de meio século.

Esses anos formativos são a antítese da minha vida profissional onde tive que me conformar para ter um mínimo de sucesso.

Minha brasileirada faz parte da minha personalidade. Aquela alegria. A cara de pau. As risadas. As injustiças. Os arrivistas. Os sem-vergonhas. O respeito. E o futebol decadente.

Hoje, não tô nem aí, e pergunto. Ouço, sem cinismo, sem pixar, para melhor compreensão.

Aprendi o português nos anos 70 quando estória era conto e história era o conto dos colonizadores portugueses. Escrevo estórias por ser não conformista.

The Quiet Frame é o que construí quando parei de pedir licença. thequietframe.com

Uma cena memorável nos enganou. O Forrest no banco com a caixa nos joelhos, e a mãe dele dizendo que a vida é assim: você nunca sabe o que vai pegar. Da o fora.

A vida é um cassino. E eu fui em vários.

Campione d’Italia, um povoado perdido em frente a Lugano. Las Vegas. Mônaco. Uma ilha no Caribe cujo nome decidi esquecer.

Nunca ganhei.

Nenhuma vez. Nem no blackjack, nem na roleta, nem nas máquinas caça-níqueis que tentei vinte minutos no Caribe. O James Bond (Jaime Grude mas temos que admitir que é melhor em inglês) nunca joga caça-níquel e eu queria entender por quê. Agora sei.

Eu entrava em cada um desses palaces como qualquer cara que viu muito filme, ou até demais. Vestindo o smoking imaginário, a trilha sonora, e a fantasia de ser o “cheguei”. As fichas. O Martini. As gatas.

E que gatas. Em Las Vegas, eu vi muito mais velhinha com baldes de papelão cheios de níqueis no colo rolando em scooter elétrico e com banha pendurada dos dois lados. Sou testemunha de um horror societal. Um horror. Mas estou divagando.

Saldo de cassino para mim: três horas, drinks de graça, e uma carteira mais delgadinha.

É esse o lance dos cassinos. Sempre foi. Cassinos não vendem jogos. Eles vendem uma fantasia que cê veste na entrada e devolve no táxi se não estiver de cueca. Os Martinis são por conta da House porque a aritmética está do lado deles.

O cassino não perdoa e é uma babaquice.

Agora, preste atenção. Já reparou que cassino não tem um único relógio à vista. Nem janela. O carpete é bem grosso para ninguém ouvir passos. O oxigênio é bombeado, levemente enriquecido. Os drinks são de graça porque quando cê bebe cê perde a noção de ser humano. A crupiê é simpática apesar de ver em cada rodada vários dos seus salários anuais serem perdidos. A simpatia é de graça e a esperança da gorjeta a motivação.

Você não sai. Te tiram. Pelo amanhecer, pela sua esposa, por uma mulher qualquer, pela carteira, ou por um sujeito musculoso de terno escuro que esteve te observando desde que você entrou.

Não quero ser chato mas eis a história.

A máquina caça-níquel foi inventada em 1898 por um mecânico chamado Charles Fey (nascido August “Gus” Fey, na terra dos alemães), em San Francisco. Recompensas variáveis. Três rolos. Chiclete e moedas como prêmio. Sem ninguém te olhando, o que foi a grande invenção para aumentar o desemprego e diminuir furtos. O invento nunca foi patenteado porque jogo de azar era ilegal na Califórnia. Aliás ainda é.

A ciência por trás do fenômeno cassino, a gente só entendeu sessenta anos depois graças a um certo B(urrhus) F. Skinner, que, em Harvard, passou a vida maltratando pombos e ratos. O terror dos bichos virou uma ciência de comportamento que conclui que somos rato ou pombo.

O Skinner descobriu que se você recompensar um pombo toda vez que ele estica o pescoço pra bicar um botão, ele bicará num ritmo estável. Se você recompensar às vezes aleatoriamente, ele bicará mais rápido. Se você recompensar quase nunca e sem nenhuma lógica, ele bicará até cair. Talvez uma grande descoberta mas é sacanagem.

Hoje é uma ciência que muitos pretendem dominar e com a qual se deleitam em esclarecer qualquer dúvida no LinkedIn. Uma ciência que permite entender como a gente sobrevive e principalmente como nos motivar a fazer coisas atordoados e sem fim.

Hoje, o rei das Américas, que não leu nada da teoria, a aplica muito bem todo santo dia sem precisar de gaiola para os pombos.

Prosseguindo no histórico.

Kevin Systrom, leu e até entendeu, já que em 2010 ele bolou e lançou Instagram. Ele oferece o seguinte conselho: learn enough to be dangerous. Valeu, obrigado Kev. Agora no meu bolso.

Zhang Yiming em Pequim, tentou uma empreitada em 2012, comprou empresas, e desde então dançamos ao ritmo dos bytes do TikTok.

Talvez você viu a publicidade do TikTok na TV recentemente. Uma adolescente passa a prova porque estudou no TikTok. Impossível viver sem essa felicidade.

Kevin é riquíssimo mas Zhang atropela por um fator de 30 com seus 60 bilhões. A moeda pouco importa. Nem dá para imaginar.

Três iterações. A primeira capturou nossa grana. A segunda matou pombos e ratos. A terceira nos sequestrou.

Evolução do fenômeno cassino. É minha observação e cheguei a essa conclusão sem machucar ninguém.

Faz décadas que não piso num cassino.

Mas estou num cassino todo dia. Em casa.

Sem horas. Sem janelas. Os cachorros são o carpete. As telas são o crupiê. O sucesso é meu jackpot.

Tive êxito com frequência para continuar. Eu empreendo e estou desenvolvendo uma maravilha. Estou chegando ao fim. Arte, chineses, IA, fotografia. Nossa! Vai ser demais.

Esse desenvolvimento é o meu cassino que sequestra tudo em mim.

Eu devia ter sacado mais cedo. Sabemos que o iPhone é o cassino de bolso. Todo mundo vê. Não?

Você que vai trabalhar, reparou no metrô, no trem, no carro que ninguém fala? Todo mundo vê. E sabe. E continuamos rolando para esquerda, para direita, para cima, para baixo. Com um polegar se você tiver a idade, ou com dois indicadores se não tiver. Rolando, girando que nem o mecanismo do Fey ou a roleta, sim, do cassino.

Eu acho que tudo que captura nossa atenção é um cassino. Em frente com antolhos postos.

Um projeto. Uma rixa. Uma reforma. Uma amizade. Um divórcio onde, por experiência, sempre perco.

Sem horas. Sem janelas. Recompensas variáveis e aleatórias. A House sempre ganha porque ela te vende a experiência e sequestra sua vida.

A maioria das pessoas que conhecemos está sentada, em casa ou no escritório, sendo consumida por algo como se estiverem em um cassino.

Sei que você ia me perguntar sobre o último sábado?

Em frente às telas às nove. Os adolescentes estão em casa, prontos para me encher o saco.

TÔ OCUPADO! Tenho que fazer MEU projeto. Lembro de três pequenas vitórias entre dez e uma, do tipo que faz você apostar mais uma ficha. Só um pouquinho mais.

Lembro dos cachorros num momento e de uns restos que requentei para o almoço, rapidinho, entre três telas. Para os adolescentes também.

Levantei os olhos por volta das três.

Me encontrei ainda no cassino e sozinho com os cachorros, ignorando o resto.

© Michel Heitzmann - A vista do meu cassino

A charmosa crupiê de colete bordô combinando com o carpete não estava aqui. Não precisava.

E eu perdi a chance de curtir os meus filhos, cachorros e primavera. Que otário.

Você consegue se desprender para curtir a vida?

Lancei o The Quiet Frame pra a gente reparar o carpete, o oxigênio, os relógios que faltam. Leva dois minutos diários para nos ajudar a lembrar que algo maior existe para ser curtido. Talvez você goste. Grátis no Apple e Android, links em thequietframe.com/app.

Te agradeço a leitura.

Share The Quiet Frame

© Michel Heitzmann - Elon and the meteor

Monday I wrote an article about a meteor shower. Tuesday I asked fifty people to step outside. Wednesday I went up the mountain a bit myself.

3:30am. I shoved the dogs in the truck. I was completely disoriented and could not find my gear. Made myself a latte.

My son woke up to go to the bathroom — I’d made too much noise. I asked if he wanted to come along. He said, literally, fuck off. I left without him, but now with a smile.

Off we went up to 1,100 meters.

4am. 2 degrees. Dogs disappointed I was setting shop when a walk was expected. The first warmth of sun starting low on the horizon though sunrise itself was still a long way off. I opened the back of the truck. Sat on it and gazed. The things were flashing. I forgot to make a wish and got busy capturing some of it on camera.

I took three frames that matter among many. Nineteen minutes between the first and the last.

© Michel Heitzmann - 04:36

04:36. Sky at its darkest. The Milky Way running diagonal through the upper right of the frame, faint but present — a slight brightening of the sky, not a stripe. Mars low, warm, steady. The Andromeda Galaxy sitting right of centre as a small oval smudge. Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away and is the furthest thing most people can see with their eyes, though most people don’t. Five or six of Elon’s satellites rolled past in parallel during the six-second exposure. One plane, warm-toned, dashed.c

© Michel Heitzmann - 04:51

04:51. Fifteen minutes later. The sky had begun to lift on the horizon — dawn was still under the mountains but already thinking about it. A meteor arrived. Short, bright, with colour evolving along its length: warm orange leading edge, white-hot core, cooling blue trail. That colour gradient is how you tell it was a meteor and not a satellite. The grain of dust was ablating at different temperatures as it disappeared. A thing from 1861 burning above Switzerland at 49 kilometres per second, over in under a second.

© Michel Heitzmann - 04:55

04:55. Four minutes later. Another meteor. Cleaner, quieter than the first — no chromatic drama, just a bluish-white streak against a sky now visibly turning toward morning. Dawn properly arriving now in the lower right. The window was closing.

Then the window closed. The sky lifted into blue and the stars thinned and Andromeda disappeared from the sensor first, then from the sky.

Slick and Thunder jumped back in the truck and we drove home. Dumped the gear and got back in bed.

Discovered some hours later what was on camera.

The camera? A Leica Q3 43. Not a telescope. Not a star-tracker. Not a modified astro camera. Six seconds, f/2.5, ISO 1600. One instrument, one moment, no tricks. The sky did the rest.

The comet is already gone. The dust is still burning. And for nineteen minutes on Wednesday morning, some of it burned above Bassins while two dogs waited in a truck and someone was outside to see it.

That’s the whole thing. That’s what the app is for.

The Quiet Frame is a bunch of apps built right here, right now. In Switzerland.

© Michel Heitzmann - Living in slices

I was sitting on the porch with people I will not incriminate. Somebody came up with a saucisson to help the wine go down. Apologies to the V crowd. The saucisson had been a breathing being at some point. Several, actually. More on that another week.

The sharp knife produced thin slices. Small talk continued. I watched the slices.

You cannot eat a saucisson whole. Well, that is almost true. I have seen Poles I know well chewing on their saucissons on ski slopes to avoid the CHF 10 hot dogs. Stay with me, you cannot eat a saucisson whole.

Put the whole thing on a plate and people stare. Slice it thin, fan it out, and within twenty minutes it is gone with the exception of the last slice none dares to touch.

Nobody noticed a meal.

My phone surfaced a Memory last week. Me in a t-shirt I still own. A decade ago, younger and much slimmer. The t-shirt fit and now, lies in a closet, poorly folded and unused. I hopelessly hope to put it back on.

WTF? Can’t wear the thing. It happened to me. One dessert. One skipped walk. One late dinner. A bit of boozing. Bad genes. A slice at a time.

None of it killed me yet.

The algorithm that surfaced the photo did not mean to indict me. It just had the data.

I am now the self-aware victim of my own data and some clever Gen Z in Cupertino.

Before my knee surgeries, I would catch myself saying, to nobody: well, it’s not as bad as yesterday.

That thought was a slice too.

The pain had not gone down. My reference point had slid. Yesterday had reset my reality. I was measuring today against a standard that was already well off and I couldn’t remember.

I was not lying to myself. I was doing what every reasonably intelligent person does when the alternative is expensive, disruptive, scary: saying to myself, it’s OK.

It took CHF 50 thousand, a saw and two new metallic knees to reset the reference point.

Now, the business version.

I watched these campaigns from the inside. Multi-year projects, in rooms few were invited into, to change legislation one comma at a time. If you cannot compete, change the law. One threshold at a time. One exception at a time. The against crowd might be fooled or have too much to lose in a fight.

The goal was never the next comma. The goal was the comma some years later, when somebody looks up and realises the sentence no longer means what it used to mean.

Nobody can point to the moment it changed.

This is not an accident. It is a method. Drawn on whiteboards. Rehearsed in strategy decks. A slice at the time. Executed by polite, perhaps obnoxious, folks who get promoted for executing it well.

I am not going to name names as you know at least one of these folks.

Here is the rule, because by now you figured it.

When you cannot make a brutal change, you slice. Always in the same direction. Each slice small enough that fighting it looks disproportionate. Each loss rationalised by the person losing it. The high-ground disappears because nobody remembers the saucisson, let alone the pig. They just see the slice.

And the asymmetry locks it in. The fear of losing from pushing back is always bigger than the potential of gaining. Every time.

Daniel Kahneman of Princeton fame and his friend Amos Tversky proved this in 1979. They got a Nobel Prize for it. For common mortals, the book is called Thinking, Fast and Slow. I own it. The whole 500 pages. I fall asleep every time I gather strength to open it.

In the rooms I worked in, we did not call it anything. We just used it to sneak our way to progress.

Others have named the slices separately, well. I see them as one thing, and the thing has a name.

It’s NOISE. Noise that hides the big picture.

So why the saucisson on the wooden board.

Because the mechanic is neutral. The knife is neutral. The direction is not.

The t-shirt and the knees, I was on the receiving side. The business slicing, I was holding the knife.

There is another kind of patience, in the opposite direction, that uses exactly the same mechanic. One thin slice at a time. Applied for, instead of against.

Some weeks I add forty lines of code. Some weeks I take photos or answer an email. Some weeks I write a piece like this one and six people write back.

None of the slices look like progress.

The direction does.

Patience on one side. Numbness on the other.

If you have read up to here, you have been a saucisson victim.

Thin slices, laid out on the screen, consumed one by one. You barely noticed because you might have been entertained or kind.

That is how we live the day. And it is alarmingly wrong as we are submerged in noise.

Instead, we should be listening to the birds. At least in my corner of the planet, they only sing a few months out of the year. How lucky I was when I was a child in Brazil. Didn’t know it and had not acknowledged the wonderful soundtracks.

Yes, put aside the noise, let’s hope the saucisson will keep breathing.

What did you agree to that you would not have agreed to had you seen the pig?

I built The Quiet Frame so we can notice the slicing, step back, and reconnect with ourselves, others, and the planet we share with the saucisson (for now). It takes the same thin slice the noise takes — a couple of minutes a day — in the other direction. Free for 7 days on iOS and Android at thequietframe.com/app.

Thanks for reading.

Share The Quiet Frame

A note on the sources:

The six categories of noise behind this series — cognitive, emotional, identity, performance, relational, algorithmic — are a The Quiet Frame construct. The concepts themselves have long histories. The works I lean on:

• Cognitive noise. Sweller, J. (1988). Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning. Cognitive Science, 12(2).

• Emotional noise. van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. Viking.

• Identity noise. Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Anchor Books.

• Performance noise. Han, B.-C. (2010). The Burnout Society (trans. 2015). Stanford University Press.

• Relational noise. Turkle, S. (2011). Alone Together. Basic Books.

• Algorithmic noise. Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs.

• The asymmetry. Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk.Econometrica, 47(2), 263–291. The popular version is Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. I own it. The whole 500 pages. I fall asleep every time I gather strength to open it.

© Michel Heitzmann - Not Superman, not a meteor, just a plane

In April 687 BC, Chinese astronomers recorded a rain of light in the sky. They probably went oh! the Chinese ancient way, wrote it down and told their children. We don’t know if they were scared or scarred. The folks in this land I inhabit were not the sophisticated bunch, they smelled awful, were a tad behind and left no record.

Tomorrow night before dawn (22 Apr pre-sunrise!), the same meteor shower peaks again.

It’s the Lyrids. It comes from the dust of a comet named Thatcher (like Margaret but more endearing). Alfred Thatcher spotted it in New York City on 5 Apr 1861 with a small telescope way before neon lights were deployed. Three weeks later, a German called Carl Wilhelm Baeker spotted it with his naked eye (the comet was brighter), rejoiced but lost the naming rights as he was in a place called Nauen that I had to look up. 18,500 inhabitants as of last count.

The comet will not return until 2283 when I expect all of us, with the exception of Elon, to be dead.

That Thatcher is a stranger we (save Elon) will never meet. But every April, Earth walks through the trail of dust it left behind, and the dust burns.

This has been happening, reliably, for longer than almost any human institution has existed. Longer than any country. Longer than most languages. Longer than the idea of a work week. And of course Elon.

And yet, if you ask ten adults when the next meteor shower is, maybe one knows (I am making this up but sounds about right.) Ask them their phone's settings and they can recite them with passion.

We have swapped one kind of attention calendar for another. The new one is louder, faster, more expensive, and about nothing worth dying for.

I built an app called The Quiet Frame. It is, among other things, a calendar.

Not a calendar of meetings. A calendar of things the sky does. Equinoxes. Solstices. Full moons. Meteor showers. The slow, reliable events that have been shaping human attention for several millennia, and that we have almost entirely stopped noticing. It is also a door to cultures we choose to ignore and from which we should learn. Its aim? For us to reconnect with the planet, each other and ourselves. A minute a day, if you can spare the change.

This morning, the app told me the Lyrids peak tomorrow before dawn (22 Apr pre-sunrise!) That is why I am writing this. I admit I would have been clueless otherwise.

An app that pings you about Slack makes you more available to Slack. An app that tells you the Lyrids peak Wednesday before dawn makes you more available to the sky. Same mechanism, more interesting.

The Lyrids are not rare. They are not exotic. They are not a one-time event you need to travel for. They happen every year, and almost nobody notices.

That is what I find most concerning, we stopped paying attention to the very cool things.

If you can step outside tomorrow before dawn — 2am to 5am local time, looking northeast, after the crescent moon sets — you will see something that people since 687 BC also saw. How cool is that?

Get up and out. Maybe a blanket and a cup of tea? But ten minutes outside.

The comet is already gone. The dust is still burning.

The Quiet Frame is a bunch of apps built right here, right now. In Switzerland.

Share The Quiet Frame

© Michel Heitzmann - Where I first met God, Geneva

Last week I told you what I believe in. Liberal. Humanist. Eco. No hesitation, no apology.

This week is why that matters.

Liberalism, in its actual meaning, and not the Republican insult, is the belief that a person can think for themselves. That the individual has the capacity, and the right, to reason freely. It sounds obvious. It is, in practice, almost never allowed. Not through chains. Through stories and belonging.

I know this because for most of my life, I was not thinking. I was performing. Exceptionally well.

I was maybe six years old in Buenos Aires. Orthodox church. Every Sunday. Standing, always standing. Yellow velvet robe on, serving mass, because that is what good boys from good families wore on Sunday mornings. Candles lit everywhere. The building packed with older folks. Thirty-something degrees (Celsius, close to 100 for those across the big, beautiful ocean) outside, considerably more inside. Nobody asked if I wanted to be there. Nobody needed to ask. This is what I must do. This is who we are.

I didn’t believe a word of it. I didn’t even understand the old slavonic gibberish. I’m not sure anyone asked me if I did. I was not thinking. I was standing in yellow velvet in thirty-degree heat, being a good boy.

Then we moved to São Paulo and the city got in the way. The church was far. Traffic was bad. My parents had golf on Sunday afternoon. Conveniently my step-dad was Catholic, so we switched to a different ritual.

Cooler building, seats, comfortable clothes, shorter affair. My struggle shifted from not fainting to fully understanding the words but not falling asleep during the homily: I memorized the mass anyway. Cordeiro de Deus que tirais o pecado do mundo. Every response, every ritual beat, every gesture. I was excellent at church.

Then, as a teenager, we stopped going altogether. The priests were pushing the theology of liberation. They were, it should be noted, following a tradition that Church had perfected over centuries: taking land from others in the name of something higher. This time the target was the big landowners (who accused the Church in turn that itself was a huge landowner and should accommodate settlers.) Redistribution in the name of God. My parents were not amused. It turned out the story was good as long as it pointed in the right way.

Nowadays the evangelists down south figured it out. Brilliant, really. Give hope to the “oppressed.” Speak their language, move into their neighbourhoods, fill the room with music and feeling and the certainty that Jesus sees them. And while you’re at it, keep them exactly where they are, skim ten percent of what they don’t have, and build a tax-free enterprise worth billions on the distance between the promise and the delivery. The Church had spent centuries taking land. The evangelists found something more efficient. They took votes and the future. And the whole Brazilian football who stopped winning.

The Russian Orthodox Church? Let me not go into smuggling and war for now.

At some point I did the math. Stories written hundreds, sometimes thousands of years ago. Meanwhile man orbits the moon. Give me a break.

That was a partial awakening. Convenient. Not dramatic. Not rebellious. Just a quiet moment of noticing the costume and the theater.

Marx called religion the opium of the people. He wasn’t wrong, but he was too economic about it. Religion isn’t just an anesthetic. It is a narrative architecture. It gives you a story in which your suffering has meaning, your compliance is virtue, your reward is deferred but guaranteed, or so we have been told. You don’t need a prison if the prisoner believes the cell is sacred. You dress a six-year-old in yellow velvet, put him in a hot decorated room, and let the ritual do the work. The brilliant part is that it doesn’t feel like control. It feels like belonging.

School works the same way. Education largely teaches alignment. The grade doesn’t measure intelligence. It measures compliance with the expected answer, delivered in the expected standard, by the expected deadline. Diverge and you are difficult or, nowadays have ADHD. Excel within the parameters and you are gifted. The system rewards its own confirmation.

I was good at school. Genuinely good. I did what was asked. I internalized the rules so thoroughly I stopped noticing they were rules. Still not thinking. Still performing.

There was one exception. On Saturday afternoon, while my friends played football outside in the South American heat, I was sitting in a classroom learning Russian. Russian. I was at the end of the world, literally the southern tip of the Americas, and someone had decided that what I urgently needed was the language of people who lived eleven time zones away, bad people that had taken all possessions from the glorious family I belonged to, in a country I could not find a single reason to care about.

Those communists were so far away they barely felt real. The indoctrination was running at full speed anyway. Language as identity, identity as loyalty, loyalty as the pride of older generations. I responded with the only weapon available to a child in a good family who cannot actually leave: complete and deliberate incompetence. I made no effort whatsoever. Zero. I was spectacularly, almost artistically bad at Russian. It was my one act of resistance against a system that had otherwise installed itself in me without a whisper of friction.

Decades later, I was posted to Russia for six years.

The universe has a very long memory and absolutely no sense of mercy.

I was four years in Argentina. Around twelve in Brazil. Six years in Russia as an adult. These were not boring political moments. Argentina and Brazil were living through regimes that had strong opinions about what citizens should think, say, and aspire to. Russia was, well, Russia. A country that has never really lost the habit of having strong opinions about those things.

Here is what I remember from all three: I was thriving.

Good grades. Good behavior. Good family. Polite. Punctual. Compliant in ways I didn’t even recognize as compliance, because I’d never tried anything else. Not thinking. Thriving.

My story is not survival. It is successful performance.

The ones who are obviously coerced get our sympathy. We make films about them. The ones who are successfully shaped never notice. They get promoted. They get applauded. They grow up and wonder much later whose definition of success they were optimizing for. I was the model child of models I had never chosen. I was winning a game whose rules I hadn’t read. I didn’t need to read them. I had a yellow velvet costume and decent manners.

Open repression is easy to recognize. Censorship. Disappeared journalists. The list of things you cannot say. It hurts visibly, which is its only disadvantage as a control mechanism. You know it’s there. The western version is subtler and, in many ways, more elegant. It doesn’t remove information.

We drown in it. It doesn’t silence you. It gives you CNN and Fox News simultaneously and lets the resulting noise do the work. Both channels running with captions in airport departure lounges across the world, neither one capable of letting a sentence finish before the chyron announces the next emergency. You don’t need to suppress the truth. You just need to make it impossible to concentrate long enough to find it. Right, Mr President?

Then came Cambridge Analytica, and we learned the game had been upgraded again. It wasn’t enough to flood the zone with noise. Now the noise could be made for you. Your feed, curated by an algorithm that had been studying you longer than your mirror, showing you exactly the content most likely to confirm what you already believed, harden what you already feared, and keep you scrolling for eleven more minutes. Democracy-flavoured. Self-administered. Outrage and attention as a subscription service you never signed up for and can’t cancel. The scandal broke in 2018. Everyone was shocked. Then everyone kept scrolling. Not thinking. Scrolling.

I deleted my accounts. Felt rather good about it. Told a few people. Nodded seriously at the dinner table about data sovereignty and consent.

Nonetheless, I gave up on the illusion of being freed up when a Swisscom agent told me what the password of my home network was. Ok, am being watched, later confirmed by a former NSC contractor exiled somewhere in Russia.

I kept performing in every other system without changing a single thing. Different stage. A disguise. Still not thinking.

Before Christmas was a holiday, it was a riot.

© Michel Heitzmann - Christmas tree, Sagrada Família, Barcelona

For centuries across Europe, the winter solstice period meant something quite specific. The poor went to the houses of the wealthy, made noise, demanded food and drink, and expected to receive them. It was called wassailing, or mumming, or simply the way December worked. It wasn’t charitable. It wasn’t sentimental. It was a social contract enforced by the implicit threat of a crowd outside your door on a cold night. The well-off paid, the poor ate, and everyone understood the arrangement.

This unpleasant pagan folklore made it to America too with the riff-raff that arrived.

Then in 1823, a poet named Clement Clarke Moore, or possibly a man named Henry Livingston Jr., published a poem either one wrote for their kids.

The poem is about a jolly, fat and white bearded man in a red suit held together by a big black belt who came down your chimney and left gifts for your children while everyone slept peacefully. No crowd outside. No negotiation. No transaction at the door. Just a warm, private, family scene with presents underneath a tree.

Within two generations it was ancient tradition. Within four it was a global economic bonanza, fueled by Coke jingles and ads, worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually. The rowdy collective ritual became a lovely family moment. The demand became a wish. The crowd became a child’s letter to the North Pole. Ding, went the cash registers.

A story doesn’t need centuries to become the truth. It just needs repetition and emotional resonance. Give it a child’s imagination and a family’s ritual and it becomes the way things have always been. Nobody designed this transformation in a boardroom (well, perhaps at Macy’s, they did.) It simply became too useful to question. For department stores, for governments, for anyone who preferred people spending quietly indoors to people rioting loudly outside.

And now? Apology to leaders, consultants and change managers but corporate culture works on the same principle, just with worse catering.

Culture fit is the polite term for your compatibility to the system. Onboarding is initiation. Please find attached and hope this finds you well are submission rituals. A social contract written by no one, enforced by everyone, where deviation reads as aggression or incompetence. Documented in annual performance reviews, ranked and stacked to determine your future compensation or if you deserve the door.

You perform these things voluntarily because the cost of not performing them is invisibility or exile. Being worse off.

You contribute to it actively as you go up the ladder. No conspiracy required. No room full of people designing it. Compliance is useful to institutions, to markets, to anyone who benefits from predictable people, a.k.a. team players. The system selects for it naturally, the way rain water finds the gutter.

And Steve said some seventeen years ago that you just needed your finger.

Steve’s phone and Eric’s copycats made the latest version of a very old operating system much better.

The upgrade nobody voted for and everybody installed. What it did was remove the friction. The church requires Sunday mornings. The school requires attendance. The corporation requires office hours (until COVID hit but now it is back on.) The phone requires nothing. It’s always on, always available, always offering the next thing to react to, always making you feel slightly behind. Claude is brilliant (used to be chatGPT until a war department overstepped) and TikTok is great, aren’t they?

You carry the compliance architecture in your pocket and you call it a lifestyle or belonging. Look at my new orange phone.

The genius of this version is that it feels like freedom. You choose to download the app. You choose to follow the account. You choose to scroll. Nobody dressed you in yellow velvet. You dressed yourself. You even paid for the phone. Sometimes dearly. You choose it all.

Or you think you choose. Elon, Sam, Mark, Tim and Dario might cherish your naivety.

The liberal promise is autonomy. The reality is that autonomy requires constant active defence. It doesn’t come pre-installed. Every generation has to fight for it against structures that benefit enormously from predictable, manageable, quietly compliant us.

I was a good boy. Excellent at church, excellent at school, thriving in countries with firm views on what thriving should look like, fluent in every corporate ritual I ever encountered. It took me an embarrassingly long time to ask who wrote the liturgy and if I had to comply.

Meanwhile, while we are perfecting our submission rituals and liking each other’s posts, something else is happening.

Species are disappearing. Forests are going. Reefs are turning white. Eight billion people, about 70% of them holding a device engineered to keep their attention moving in small fast circles, and the thing that actually needs watching is everywhere around them. Not behind a screen. Just outside the window.

I was not thinking. Perhaps I am starting now.

Are you thinking?

I built The Quiet Frame to help us reconnect with ourselves, others and the planet. Not sure am doing a good job but at least I have a go. If you are curious, go to thequietframe.com/app, download it, yes ironically, to your smartphone, and let me know what you think.

Thanks for reading.

Share The Quiet Frame

© Michel Heitzmann - Let the bumble be

Fais-le pas sur mes couilles

Não pise no meu saco

The plane lands and makes it to the gate. Ping goes the speaker. In unison, passengers get up to deplane. They jam the aisle with carry-ons, kids, elbows, convinced that being first standers equals fast deplaning. My seat is always on an aisle. I wait seated. Inevitably, I get whacked by the coat, the bag, the butt.

It pisses me off. Not because of the coat.

I respect your space and expect the same back. That is not a complicated stance. It is the one I have held my entire life.

You can be a fucking lunatic if you want. I let you be.

That is, until you step on my testicle. Then I holler and let the fingers loose on the keyboard.

That defines me as a liberal. Yes! A liberal! A label which in America earns you a place in a hospice and which in Europe has been quietly removed from profiles, softened in meetings, replaced with “I tend to think” instead of “I believe.” I have watched people who hold exactly these values perform their own disappearing act unaware and often in slow motion.

Free from corporate handcuffs, I am now in overdrive.

A concrete example. My accountant told me I had a tax liability in Russia. Pre-Ukraine, but not pre-Putin. She admonished me with the grave consequences of not honoring it. I asked her to cook the books and gave the money to the Swiss government instead, as the alternative was funding something I consider indefensible.

Nobody noticed. That is often how convictions work. They show up in small, invisible acts that nobody applauds. They feel good.

© Michel Heitzmann - Am done

Others pay more for the same conviction. They emigrate. Or stay and go quiet. Many die.

Convictions are also useful in the collective. And on that front, we have our work cut out.

I am not making this up: some folks think that Switzerland needs a cap of ten million residents. Due process, enough signatures, it goes to a vote. A democracy deciding how many humans are allowed on our island. So far, I am arguing against this lunacy as polls indicate we are in a throw of dice moment.

I start with historical perspective: does anybody believe that a bunch of shepherds came down the mountain and figured out chocolate, watches and pharma? The answer is no — check Nestlé and Rolex.

Then the economics and genetic pool arguments. Foreigners pay taxes too. How do you think we got semi-decent at football? Have you checked the composition of the team lately, Frau Meier?

None of that registers with the people who signed the petition. I go for the absurd and wacky scenario. Imagine they win and the constitution is changed. By 204X, the country hits exactly ten million. And we will now, we count everything over here.

A baby is born. Shit — somebody quickly die, or we deport Shakheela or Granit. Perhaps even both to have some wiggle room.

Here we are, because of the constant noise, with fewer people who think.

Jemima Kelly wrote in the FT that liberals should be less shy about saying what they stand for. She is right. Shyness is not modesty. It is capitulation by installment. The salami slice-cutting applied to identity, one thin slice of self-censorship at a time, until one day one looks down and cannot find what one used to believe in. Compromises at work.

The world does not need more people who almost hold convictions. It needs normal people to make their point clear and resist a butt in their face.

The slicing is what the world does to you. The quiet is what you owe yourself.

Have you been sliced up lately to make others more comfortable?

The world is loud. Yours doesn’t have to be.

An app to help you take a step back is available on iOS and Android. The Quiet Frame gives you space to reconnect with the world and yourself. It is a window, perhaps an open door, to other cultures, nature and our planet. It is free for 7 days.

Check out the app

Share The Quiet Frame

© Michel Heitzmann - Le bourdon tient à ses choses

Note de style. Le français est une langue que trop aiment compliquer. Habitant à Paris, j’ai entendu, je n’écoutais pas, des tournures magnifiques, des phrases interminables, des discours ennuyeux. Franchement, c’est insupportable. Avec mes ados, nous parlons simple et à l’horreur de ma mère utilisons putain comme une ponctuation ou une pause pensante.

The Quiet Frame est ce que j’ai construit quand j’ai arrêté de lever la main. thequietframe.com

L’avion atterrit et rejoint le gate. Ding fait le haut-parleur. DU COUP (comme on dit en France), tous les passagers se hissent comme des cons pour débarquer. Ils bloquent l’allée avec leurs bagages à main, leur vestes et manteaux, leurs gosses effrénés, tous convaincus qu’en se levant, ils seront plus rapides au portillon. Mon siège est toujours couloir. J’attends assis en torturant l’impatiente assise au milieu qui morfle avec des soupirs. Je glande et inévitablement, me ramasse le manteau, le sac, un cul dans la gueule.

Putain, que ça m’fait chier. Pas à cause du cul.

Mais parce que moi, je respecte ton espace, ta place et j’attends la même chose en retour.

C’est pourtant pas compliqué, et j’y crois depuis toujours.

Tu peux être le dernier des cons si tu veux. L’emmerdeur chef. Le mec qui plante tout le monde. Le branleur. Je te laisse faire.

Jusqu’au moment où tu me piétines les couilles. Et là, je hurle.

Je suis un libéral, un humaniste. Des labels qui en Amérique te valent une place en hospice et qui en Europe ont été discrètement effacés des profils, disparus dans les séances, remplacés par « j’aurais tendance à penser » à la place de « je crois. » J’ai vu des mecs qui partagent mon avis s’effacer lentement sans s’en rendre compte, et au ralenti. Mais dis Hugues, je croyais, je fais. Ouais, mais tu vois, la-li-la-la-la.

Libre comme une mouche sur une merde, je me convertis en ayatollah du libéralisme. Je hurle au clavier dans l’espoir qu’on me lise. Et j’agis.

Anecdote. Ma comptable me signale que j’ai une dette fiscale en Russie. Je lui rétorque que je m’en fous et que je ne la solderai jamais. Elle, comptable et suissesse, pâlit. Elle me fait le topo Solzhénistine. Je la calme, et lui propose d’être créative pour que je paye le fisc suisse. Elle me trouve la combine, j’allonge et souris de ne pas avoir financé ces criminels odieux.

Personne n’a remarqué. Ce sont des valeurs, des convictions qui se manifestent dans des actes petits, invisibles, que personne n’applaudit mais qui font du bien.

© Michel Heitzmann - Fini. Je paye plus.

D’autres paient aussi en émigrant. Ou restent sur place et se taisent. Il y en a un paquet qui en meurent.

En Suisse, il y a des cons aussi et parfois ils se rassemblent et s’organisent.

Après l’interdiction de minarets, du voile porté par trois personnes dans tout le pays, voilà qu’à nouveau inspirés, ils brament NON à une Suisse de plus de dix millions d’habitants. Ok, je souriais jusqu’à ce qu’ils obtiennent les centaines de milliers de signatures pour que le peuple se prononce. Tu vois le topo ? Une phrase dans la constitution, noir sur blanc, dix millions et basta.

Le genre de connerie que tu vois dans un film quand le scénario bascule dans le macabre ou en Amérique. À l’instant, les sondages sont serrés.

Et j’explique. J’essaye l’argument historique, logique en posant la bonne question. Tu crois vraiment que les paysans sont descendus des pâturages pour inventer le chocolat, l’horlogerie ou créer des monstres pharmaceutiques ? Ça marche moyennement malgré les exemples de Nestlé et Rolex. J’insiste : les étrangers paient des impôts aussi. D’ailleurs ils sont souvent plus beaux que nous. Ça convainc à moitié.

Et finalement, comment tu crois que ça nous arrive de battre les Bleus de Mbappé ? T’as vérifié dernièrement la compo de l’équipe, Frau Meier ?

Aucun de ces arguments n’atteint les gens qui ont signé la pétition, donc je pousse pour que les gens votent.

Je leur fais ce topo : imagine qu’ils gagnent. D’ici 204X, la Suisse atteint exactement dix millions. Un bébé naît. Merde — quelqu’un doit se sacrifier, sinon on expulse Shakheela ou Granit. Voire les deux pour avoir une marge.

On en est là, parce que les gens sont de plus en plus noyés dans le bruit et réfléchissent pas assez.

Jemima Kelly a écrit dans le FT que les libéraux devraient être moins timides et dire ce qu’ils défendent. Elle a raison. Se taire, c’est pas être modeste. C’est une autocensure, une capitulation grave. Tu y crois, parle !

On n’a pas besoin de ceux qui ont presque des convictions. Il nous faut des braves, tout à fait normaux, qui refusent de se prendre un cul dans la gueule.

Et toi, tu fais quoi ?

The world is loud. Yours doesn’t have to be*.

*\Le monde est bruyant. Le tien ne doit pas forcément l’être.

\ Loi n° 94-665 du 4 août 1994 relative à l’emploi de la langue française, dite loi Toubon. Article 2 : l’emploi de la langue française est obligatoire dans toute publicité écrite, parlée ou audiovisuelle. On s’y plie car c’est un bon compromis.*

Une app pour t’aider à prendre du recul est disponible sur iOS et Android. The Quiet Frame te donne l’espace de te reconnecter au monde et à toi-même. C’est une fenêtre, peut-être une porte qui s’ouvre sur d’autres cultures, la nature et notre planète. Gratuit pendant 7 jours.

Mais oui, soyons curieux

Share The Quiet Frame

© Michel Heitzmann - O abelhão, sorte dele, não tem saco

O português é a fala da minha infância, adolescência, de alguns anos de trabalho e de grandes amizades de meio século.

Esses anos formativos são a antítese da minha vida profissional onde tive que me conformar para ter um mínimo de sucesso.

Minha brasileirada faz parte da minha personalidade. Aquela alegria. A cara de pau. As risadas. As injustiças. Os arrivistas. Os sem-vergonhas. O respeito. E o futebol decadente.

Hoje, não tou nem aí, e pergunto. Ouço, sem cinismo, sem pixar, para melhor compreensão.

Aprendi o português nos anos 70 quando estória era conto e história eram o conto dos colonizadores portugueses. Escrevo estórias por ser não conformista.

The Quiet Frame é o que construí quando parei de pedir licença. thequietframe.com

Não pise no meu saco.

O avião pousa e chega ao portão A52. Ouvimos o dingue. Impacientes, os passageiros se levantam para desembarcar. Sempre tem o idiota da janela que pede um bolso XXL para pô-lo nos joelhos. Enquanto isso, o corredor vira uma zona de bagagens de mão, casacos, piralhos gritantes, e cretinos de pé que acham que sairão mais rápido. Minha poltrona é sempre no corredor. Espero sentado olhando a mulher do meio ficar lívida por minha falta de ação. Inevitavelmente, levo o casaco, a bolsa, e uma bunda na cara.

Essas situações são previsíveis e se repetem a cada voo e porém elas me irritam. Não é a bunda ou o cutuque constante. É o ataque ao meu espaço físico. E também mental.

Eu respeito o seu espaço e sempre espero que você respeite o meu. Não é complicado e é a minha convicção de décadas.

Olha, cê pode ser um babaca se quiser, um corta-tesão, um evangelista e até um republicano da Flórida. Eu não tou nem aí, até cê me atingir na minha liberdade de ser e pisar no meu saco

Quando acontece, eu berro de viva voz ou com o teclado.

Sou um liberal com uma forte tendência verde. Liberal no sentido político-econômico de laissez-faire e do lado humano de estar pouco me importando daquilo que os outros pensam. Deixei de julgar aqueles que ainda acreditam ou são capazes de matar por causa de contos milenares.

O meu lado verde não é inspirado do dólar mas sim do sistema que nos dá vida, ou seja, a natureza. Salve a natureza sambou Beth Carvalho na minha infância (procure no Spotify, vale a pena, “não desmate o nosso chão porque ele é a nossa riqueza…vi comício, ouvi promessa, mas eu não vi firmeza”).

Agora, ser liberal é difícil. No mundo corporativo eu percebo que a muitos falta coragem e eles constroem frases de fazer avaliações, de proceder com cautela, de inação. Cadê o pessoal que acredita? Vi gente que pouco a pouco para preservar perde até a personalidade.

Lutar contra essa moleza é minha missão.

Anedota. Minha contadora me indicou que eu carregava uma dívida fiscal na Rússia. Pré-Ucrânia, mas não pré-Putin. Ela me explicou as graves consequências de não honrar a dívida. Mas nem que a vaca tussa, ache um jeito pra não financiar esses merdas. Ela achou e acabei pagando a dívida à nossa ilustre confederação helvética. Ninguém reparou e tudo bem.

© Michel Heitzmann - Perdão, mas deixei a minha carteira em casa

É assim que as convicções funcionam. Aparecem em atos pequenos, invisíveis, que ninguém aplaude. Mas fazem bem.

Outros pagam bem mais por convicções. Migram. Ou ficam e se calam. E tem um monte que morre por convicção.

Temos que lutar para preservar o nosso espaço e convicções.

Um exemplo da minha vizinhança. Tem idiota por aqui que acha que a Suíça precisa de um teto de dez milhões de habitantes. O argumento é que não temos os recursos para ter mais quando na realidade é racismo e chauvinismo para preservar o cartão postal. Fizeram o processo legal, conseguiram assinaturas suficientes, e a resolução vai ao voto. Se passar muda a constituição. As pesquisas indicam que a probabilidade de cataclisma é real.

E lá vou eu a explicar com perguntas incisivas. Você realmente acha que um bando de pastores desceu da montanha e inventou o chocolate, os relógios e a indústria farmacêutica? A resposta sendo não, vieram de fora — e há séculos. Continuam a vir para a nossa glória nacional como a Nestlé ou a Rolex.

Aí vai o argumento econômico: olha que o estrangeiro também paga imposto. E finalmente o genético: como cê acha que podemos ganhar da França enquanto o Brasil não consegue? Frau Meier, confere a escalação da nossa seleção com atenção detalhada no meio-campo e ataque. Peraí, na zaga tem o Akanji e o Rodriguez.

Nenhum desses argumentos convence os que assinaram a petição. Aí eu vou no absurdo.

Imagina que a resolução vire constituição. Em 204X, o país chegará exatamente a dez milhões de habitantes. É inevitável. Um bebê nasce. E aí, a gente faz o quê? Alguém vai ter que se sacrificar, ou teremos que deportar a Luiza ou o Granit. Quem sabe até os dois, pra ter uma margemzinha.

Chegamos a esses absurdos porque nesse caos constante, diarreia de informação, e avalanche de vídeos a gente não tem tempo para pensar.

Jemima Kelly escreveu no FT que os liberais deveriam ser menos tímidos e defender aquilo que acreditam. Ela tem razão. O que vivemos é uma capitulação frente àqueles que são organizados. E nós, com uma fatia de autocensura de cada vez, calamos as nossas convicções e perdemos a noção do que acreditamos.

Precisamos de gente normal que pense, se recuse a ser atropelada e que tenha a coragem de agir.

Concorda, ou você também se deixou levar pelo caos?

O mundo é barulhento. O seu não precisa ser. (The world is loud. Yours doesn’t have to be)

Um app pra te ajudar a dar um passo atrás está disponível no iOS e Android. The Quiet Frame te dá espaço pra se reconectar com o mundo e consigo mesmo. É uma janela, talvez uma porta aberta, para outras culturas, a natureza e o nosso planeta. Gratuito por 7 dias e em português do Brasil.

Vou dar uma olhada

Share The Quiet Frame

© Michel Heitzmann - A lunatic looks up

The moon runs things.

Entire ecosystems release eggs simultaneously on the same full moon, coordinated across hundreds of kilometers of ocean. Sea turtles find their beaches by it. Dung beetles walk in straight lines by it. Plankton migrate through the ocean every month in response to the light of a rock 380,000 kilometers away. Lions hunt differently around it. Moths evolved to fly by it. For humans, the moon is a god, a planet, a timekeeper, and a calendar. The Greeks had Selene, the Romans Luna, the Hindus Chandra, the Japanese Tsukuyomi.

The Aztecs saw fertility and rebirth, and the Chinese have a Moon Festival every autumn rooted in the belief that a woman lives there along with the Jade Rabbit. That one makes sense to me as I divorced twice.

Every civilization builds around the moon because it tracks human reproduction as much as it tracks seasons.

Easter weekend? The church used the moon because the pilgrims needed its light to travel at night on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. A 1,700-year-old algorithm, still running, albeit confusing us all when the Julian tribe (orthodox) went one way and the Gregorian (Rome) one the other.

Humans went indoors with candles and LED. The body kept the rhythm but we might not notice anymore. The language though kept the memory as in lunatics along menstruating loonies talk lunacy every Monday of every month. Same with lundi or lunes.

At time of publication four humans are flying towards the Moon in a capsule the size of a large shower. The engineering is extraordinary. I did not care much until the press office spoke. For all humanity.

Give me a break. Humanity was not consulted. The Artemis program is a $100 billion thing. Humanity is $350 million short of feeding children in the Congo. UNICEF just took a 20% budget cut. The World Food Programme needs $16.9 billion to feed 123 million people for a year.

The entire annual funding for conservation work is about $3 billion. One Artemis launch $4 billion: some lunatics need to hurry before the Chinese.

The moon has been for all of us, every insomniac, farmer, sailor, coral polyp, dung beetle, plant and my dogs for 4.5 billion years.

I went outside with one of my cameras. If that makes me a loonie, I am in good company.

The world is loud. Yours doesn’t have to be.

Full disclosure: I did not put a cent in the Artemis program and am human but neither Chinese nor American.

Share

© Michel Heitzmann - Thunder and Slick, characters in the story

En français

Em português

The first time was not dramatic.

Columbia University, 1984. I was broke. My girlfriend, later the mother of two of my children, got me a job at a Barnes & Noble downtown. A few dollars an hour. Simple task: take a cart of books, put them back on the shelves. Alphabetically.

My alphabet fell apart after N. My English was worse. The manager gave me less than an hour before she showed me the door. Never got paid.

I took the subway back up to the dorm. Relieved.

The ones that followed were better paid. Each exit came with a severance and a jump to a higher salary somewhere else. I treated it as a system. Get fired, land higher. It worked until 2008, when the whole thing collapsed and I ended up bankrupt.

At some point I needed money badly enough to take a job in Siberia. They asked if I wanted an exploratory trip first. I said no. I knew if I saw the place I would not go.

I landed.

Novosibirsk. Six hours behind Europe. Nine with flights from Geneva when they were flights. So far from anything that the American Minuteman missiles were theoretically unable to reach it. For them it was just where their parents and grandparents had been sent to work. Or had chosen to go. The distinction mattered to them.

For me it was another planet.

A man from Vladivostok asked me, sometime in the first weeks, what I liked best about the city.

Without hesitation: the airport.

That became the joke for four years.

Siberia turned out to be a blessing. Being broken in a place that foreign to everything meant there was nothing to perform for. No context that knew the previous version of me. Just a man doing a job in a faraway city.

In Siberia people like dogs. They walk them without collecting the shit. Then it snows. The snow never melts. Passageways get carved through it, and after a while you are walking on sidewalks a meter above where they should be. Spring comes, the snow melts, and it is like a mille-feuilles of shit being revealed over days with an olfactory ≈

© Michel Heitzmann - Seriously a lot of snow

It is hard to explain minus thirty, minus forty. Minus forty is the same number on both scales. That is the only time Europeans and Americans agree on how cold it is.

I tried to reproduce the sensation at home. Stepped out of the shower, still wet, ran to the freezer and turned on a fan next to it. Close. But not the same. At minus thirty, you cry and the tears freeze.

To be fair, outside the Soviet cities, Siberia is National Geographic stuff.

I found a bottle of Evian on the supermarket shelf one afternoon. Stopped. Felt something close to home.

Then I thought about the carbon cost of shipping French spring water to western Siberia.

I kept buying it anyway. PET bottles in the trash. Every time.

The last firing was different. Retired early. No bounce. No next offer waiting. I was the one who could not understand the new stuff, apparently. Just the end of something, with no structure to absorb it. Out of Paris, back home.

That one I had to sit with.

And sitting with it I realized something uncomfortable: I had never actually processed any of the others. I had just moved. Each time I stored and jumped. Grief on a schedule. The pace protected me from noticing what I was carrying.

I was left watching the grass grow and mowing it down.

The evenings helped. Four drinks, maybe. I was never an alcoholic, I reckon. It doesn’t matter. I was looking forward to it. It made me come alive. Always the “good” stuff. Made me feel like myself.

That is worth pausing on.

If you need four drinks to feel like yourself in the evenings, there is something you are not feeling during the day.

I did not ask that question at the time.

The house was large and empty. It had been a family house. Then it was just mine.

I put a wooden bike in the living room. A rowing machine next to it. Both barely used. They look pretty. No compromises. I did what I wanted with the place. The space became what I actually wanted, not what was expected of it.

Slick came first. We are attached in the way that embarrasses people who have not had a dog. When I leave he gets angry. When I am out I rush back. He is a Belgian Malinois. This detail is relevant.

Thunder was almost not mine. Slick’s nephew, also a Malinois. My sister had reserved him from the same woman who sold me Slick — a cashier at a supermarket somewhere in Southern France who knew how to raise animals. My sister changed her mind.

I went with my daughter to collect him. We brought Slick. He met his mother again. He was surrounded by the whole litter and did not know what to do with himself. Overwhelmed. My daughter too. She wanted to take two of them home. She settled on Thunder.

The rest is history, the best part.

Both knees gave out after the dog walks. The surgeon suggested replacing both simultaneously. I said fine. Turns out nobody does that. He mentioned it in recovery, casually, that it had gone well. It was only the second time he had done both legs. The first had apparently also gone well.

Nobody under fifty understands why you would do this voluntarily. Everyone over fifty understands immediately.

I was immobile for weeks. In that stillness, I stopped drinking. No decision. No drama. I was afraid of falling. I needed my senses. So I stopped.

(I do not miss it at all.)

My teenage son moved in without announcing it. He just started being there more. A supermarket carton full of clothes at the time. Then he was just there. I did not ask why. I think I already knew.

I had become calmer. Probably more fun to be around.

That is the whole story, compressed. Not the firings. Not Siberia. Not the drinking. Not the knees. The thing underneath all of it: I got quieter, and the people I love moved closer.

There is a lot of advice about resilience. About bouncing back. About reframing.

None of it is wrong. None of it is the point either.

The only way through grief is with people who ask you the questions you are not asking yourself. During my coaching training there were tears, difficult sessions, and friendships that felt unavoidable. That is where the processing happened. The witches call it healing.

Decades late. But it happened.

Everything has its right time. Unless you are already dead. So hurry. Quietly.

What are you carrying that you have been too busy jumping to put down?

Share The Quiet Frame

© Michel Heitzmann - Thunder e Slick que aparecem na estória

O português é a fala da minha infância, adolescência, de alguns anos de trabalho e de grandes amizades de meio século.

Esses anos formativos são a antítese da minha vida profissional onde tive que me conformar para ter um mínimo de sucesso.

Minha brasileirada faz parte da minha personalidade. Aquela alegria. A cara de pau. As risadas. As injustiças. Os arrivistas. Os sem-vergonhas. O respeito. E o futebol decadente.

Hoje, não tou nem ai, e pergunto. Ouço, sem cinismo, sem pixar, para melhor compreensão.

Aprendi o português nos anos 70 quando estória era conto e história eram o conto dos colonizadores portugueses. Escrevo estórias por ser não conformista.

The Quiet Frame é o que construí quando parei de pedir licença. thequietframe.com

Levei cartão vermelho, cartões vermelhos seis vezes na minha vida profissional. Rua.

A primeira vez foi cômico.

Nova Iorque. Columbia University. Paquerando fiquei duro. Minha namorada, e agora a mãe de dois dos meus filhos, me mandou a uma livraria na Manhattan burguesa onde ela tinha me conseguido um emprego. Alguns dólares por hora.

Missão simples: pegar um carrinho cheio de livros e colocá-los na prateleira em ordem alfabética.

Meu alfabeto desmoronava depois do N. A gerente me observou meia hora, e ai colocou a mão no meu ombro e falou bye. Eu quis reclamar a grana dos quinze minutos trabalhados mas com péssimo inglês e sendo ilegal, me calei.

Peguei o metrô de volta para o dormitório.

As demissões que vieram depois foram mais rentáveis. Cada saída era acompanhada de uma indenização e um salto de salário e em responsabilidade. Um mecanismo que eu fingi estar dominando: ser demitido, aterrissar, mais alto e melhor. Funcionou até 2008, quando tudo desabou com a bolsa e eu fali. Mãe, me empresta uma grana.

Estando bem na merda, aceitei um emprego na Sibéria. Eles ofereceram uma viagem exploratória que rejeitei sabendo que se eu visse o lugar não aceitaria.

Aterrissei na puta que pariu, num mundo insólito e feio.

Novossibirsk, centro de pesquisa soviético longe de tudo para que os mísseis Minuteman americanos não a alcançassem, fica a seis fusos da Europa, nove horas de voo passando por Moscou de Genebra quando os voos existiam.

Hoje, graças a um filho da puta de presidente é bem mais complicado fazer o trajeto inclusive com escalas em países que cê nem sabe que existem. Não que eu me aventure após caracterizar o sujeito corretamente na frase anterior.

Voltando no tempo, pra mim foi tudo insólito, surrealista e uma piada. Pra eles era a realidade, já que se não eram filhos dos deportados eram de algum ilustre em física ou matemática.

Um cara de Vladivostok (fica ao norte da Coreia do Norte quando a puta que pariu chega ao Pacífico do lado do Japão) me perguntou nas primeiras semanas o que eu mais gostava na cidade. Sem hesitar: o aeroporto. Virou piada por quatro anos.

A Sibéria acabou sendo uma bênção, porque estar destruído num lugar tão longe de tudo significava que minha versão anterior simplesmente não existia, só um cara fazendo seu trabalho numa cidade distante. Não exatamente. Eu era um dos três estrangeiros numa cidade de um milhão, virei, sem querer, celebrity. Um outro era um peruano chefe de manutenção da linha aérea local que eu rapidamente deixei de usar. O terceiro, um financeiro inglês escondido dos britânicos após cometer fraude.

É difícil explicar menos 30, menos 40. Tentei reproduzir em casa saindo do chuveiro ainda molhado e pelado correndo pro congelador com um ventilador ligado do lado. Quase, mas não é igual, porque com menos trinta você chora e as lágrimas congelam. A cara doi.

Os siberianos passeiam cachorros como qualquer um, mas sem recolher a bosta.

E aí vem neve e nunca derrete naqueles seis meses de frio, abrem-se passagens por ela e depois de um tempo você anda em calçadas um metro acima de onde elas realmente estão.

© Michel Heitzmann - Como tem neve!

As temperaturas vão ao positivo quando cê já não acredita que seja possível. A neve derrete repentinamente mas com tanta neve compacta, o gotejamento demora semanas. E acontece o fenômeno fedido do mil-folhas de merda desaparecendo aos poucos com milhões de moscas. Chega a primavera.

Agora, fora das cidades soviéticas, a Sibéria é National Geographic. Assunto pra outro dia.

A última demissão foi na França, outro lugar que eu adoro pixar mas não agora. Aposentadoria precoce me disseram.

Tentei mas fiquei sem rebote, sem próxima oferta, o cara sentado no banco de reservas num jogo que tinha acabado. Saí de Paris, voltei à Suíça com a mente em caos.

Sem distração do cotidiano executivo, percebi que nunca tinha processado todos os efeitos de rejeições contínuas.

A casa é grande, tinha sido de família, agora é só minha. Coloquei uma bicicleta de madeira na sala com um remo do lado, os dois quase sem uso, mas são lindos.

Slick chegou primeiro. A gente é apegado de um jeito que constrange os que nunca tiveram cachorro. Quando saio ele fica bravo, quando estou fora, me apresso de voltar.

Thunder quase não foi meu. Sobrinho do Slick, também um Malinois. Minha irmã tinha reservado ele na mesma senhora que me vendeu o Slick. Uma caixeira de supermercado perdida no interior que sabia criar animais.

Minha irmã mudou de ideia e fui buscar a fera com minha filha e o Slick. Num encontro carinhoso com a mãe e a irmã, ele ficou sem jeito com tanto cachorrinho entre as patas. Apelei à razão quando minha filha quis levar dois e ela escolheu o Thunder que a tinha escolhido.

Me vi olhando a grama crescer e cortando ela. Tendo mil ideias uma mais cretina que a outra. Bebi e bem talvez pra não reconhecer a derrota emocional.

Aí os dois joelhos cederam depois das caminhadas com os cachorros. O cirurgião sugeriu trocar os dois simultaneamente e eu concordei sem debater nem perguntar nada.

Após a operação, ele revelou na sala de recuperação que era a segunda vez que tinha ousado cortar duas pernas simultaneamente. Fui verificar no Google, e é verdade que ninguém em sã consciência faz isso.

Fiquei imóvel por semanas e naquele silêncio, com medo de cair, parei de beber. Sem drama algum, simplesmente eu precisava de todos os meus sentidos. Então parei pra nunca mais recomeçar.

Meu filho adolescente se mudou pra casa sem avisar. Começou só a estar mais por aqui. Uma caixa de papelão de supermercado cheia de roupa foi a primeira até que depois de várias micro mudanças, ele mora comigo. Não perguntei por quê. Acho que eu sei.

Eu sou um cara bem mais agradável que fui.

É essa a estória que eu quero contar. Não aquela das demissões, nem da cachaça, e tampouco dos joelhos.

Tem muito guru, muitas igrejas e pentelhação sobre resiliência, sobre como se reerguer e se ressignificar.

O único caminho pelo luto é com pessoas que te fazem as perguntas difíceis e ficam quando as lágrimas chegam. São as amizades que me ajudaram a despertar.

Tudo tem sua hora certa. A não ser que cê já esteja morto: se apresse com tranquilidade.

E agora eu te pergunto:

O que você anda carregando e fingindo que não existe?

Share The Quiet Frame

© Michel Heitzmann - Thunder et Slick, les fidèles

Note de style. Le français est une langue que trop aiment compliquer. Habitant à Paris, j’ai entendu, je n’écoutais pas, des tournures magnifiques, des phrases interminables, des discours ennuyeux. Franchement, c’est insupportable. Avec mes ados, nous parlons simple et à l’horreur de ma mère utilisons putain comme une ponctuation ou une pause pensante.

The Quiet Frame est ce que j’ai construit quand j’ai arrêté de lever la main. thequietframe.com

Viré six fois dans ma carrière.

La première fois, c’était drôle.

New York. Columbia University. Je claquais plus que j’avais. Ma nana, plus tard la mère de deux des miens, me décroche un job dans une librairie en bas de Manhattan. Quelques dollars de l’heure. Mission simple : prendre un chariot de bouquins et les remettre en rayon. Dans l’ordre alphabétique.

Mon alphabet s’effondrait après le N. Mon anglais était pire. La boss m’a observé moins d’une heure avant de prendre le balai. Je me souviens encore comme elle m’a pris les livres de la main et m’a remercié, d’ailleurs sans me payer le quart d’heure sué.

J’ai repris le métro jusqu’à la fac. Soulagé.

Les suivants épisodes étaient mieux payés. Chaque départ venait avec une indemnité et un saut de salaire ailleurs. J’avais fait un système. Se faire virer, atterrir plus haut. Ça marchait jusqu’en 2008, quand tout s’est effondré et que je me suis retrouvé sans thune.

J’ai accepté un job en Sibérie. Ils m’ont proposé un voyage exploratoire d’abord. J’ai dit non. Je savais que si je voyais le village je refuserais.

J’ai atterri.

Novossibirsk. Six heures derrière l’Europe. Neuf de Genève quand il y avait des vols. Quel enfoiré, leur président.

Si loin de tout que les missiles Minuteman américains ne pouvaient théoriquement pas l’atteindre. Pour moi c’était insolite. Pour eux c’était la réalité de leurs parents, souvent des mathématiciens, physiciens et tous les autres métiers qui font vivre ces derniers.

Un collègue de Vladivostok m’a demandé, les premières semaines, ce que j’aimais le mieux dans la ville.

Sans hésiter : l’aéroport.

Ça a été la blague pendant quatre ans.

La Sibérie s’est révélée une bénédiction. Être perdu dans un endroit aussi loin de tout, ça voulait dire qu’aucun contexte ne connaissait la version précédente de moi. Juste un mec qui faisait son boulot dans une ville lointaine. Un des cinq étrangers dans une ville d’un million. Tout le monde me disait bonjour sans que je sache de qui il s’agissait.

En Sibérie les gens aiment les chiens un peu comme tout le monde. Ils les promènent mais, détail, sans ramasser la merde. Puis il neige. La neige ne fond jamais car, tu l’as deviné, il fait froid. On creuse des passages dedans, et au bout d’un moment on marche sur des trottoirs un mètre au-dessus de là où ils furent.

Le printemps arrive, la neige fond, et c’est un mille-feuilles de merde qui se révèle sur plusieurs jours avec la bande olfactive.

© Michel Heitzmann - Encore de la neige

Pour le froid, c’est indescriptible. Comment expliquer un moins 30, voir 40. Faisons simple. Moins quarante, c’est le même chiffre sur les deux échelles. C’est le seul moment où les Européens et les Américains s’entendent. Quel enfoiré, l’autre président.

Plus bas, essaye de te foutre une fois sorti de la douche, toujours à poil dans ton congélateur, et oublie pas de brancher un ventilateur industriel à côté.

Faut dire qu’en dehors des villes soviétiques, la Sibérie c’est du National Geographic.

J’ai trouvé de l’Evian sur l’étagère du supermarché un après-midi. Je me suis arrêté. Quelque chose comme un sentiment d’être chez moi car c’est l’eau du lac.

Puis j’ai pensé au bilan carbone d’expédier de l’eau en Sibérie occidentale.

S’en fout. J’en ai acheté quand même. Bouteille PET à la poubelle. À chaque fois.

Le dernier licenciement était différent. Mis à la retraite anticipée. Pas de rebond. Pas d’offre suivante. J’étais apparemment un mec “incapable de comprendre” les nouvelles tendances. Juste la fin de quelque chose, sans structure pour amortir. Hors de Paris, retour en Suisse.

Vlan !

Et en le digérant j’ai réalisé quelque chose d’inconfortable : je n’avais jamais vraiment traité les autres échecs. J’avais juste bougé. À chaque fois je stockais et je sautais. Le deuil sur agenda. Le rythme me protégeait de remarquer ce que je portais.

La maison est grande et vide. Ça avait été une maison de famille. Maintenant c’est juste la mienne.

J’ai mis un vélo en bois dans le salon. Un rameur à côté. Les deux à peine utilisés mais ils sont beaux. Aucun compromis nécessaire. L’espace est devenu ce que je voulais vraiment, pas ce qu’on attendait de lui.

Slick est arrivé en premier. On est attachés d’une façon qui gêne les gens qui n’ont jamais eu de chien. Quand je pars il se fâche. Quand je suis dehors je rentre en vitesse.

Thunder était presque pas le mien. Le neveu de Slick, aussi un Malinois. Ma sœur l’avait réservé chez la même dame qui m’avait vendu Slick, une caissière chez un Intermarché paumé dans les Alpes Provençales, qui savait élever des animaux. Ma sœur a changé d’avis. Je suis allé le chercher avec ma fille et Slick. Lui, il a retrouvé sa mère. Il était entouré de toute la portée et débordé. Ma fille voulait en prendre deux. Elle a choisi finalement Thunder. Ou peut-être l’inverse.

Le reste. La meilleure partie.

Je me suis retrouvé à regarder l’herbe pousser et à la tondre.

Les soirées aidaient. Quatre verres, peut-être. J’ai jamais été alcoolique, je crois. Ça change rien. Je les attendais. Ça me faisait revivre. Toujours les “bons” produits. Je me sentais enfin moi-même.

Ça mérite un stop.

Si t’as besoin de quatre verres le soir pour te sentir toi-même, c’est qu’il y a quelque chose que tu ne ressens pas pendant la journée.

Je me posais pas la question.

Puis les deux genoux ont lâché après les promenades avec les chiens. Le chirurgien a proposé de remplacer les deux simultanément. J’ai dit d’accord. Personne fait ça. J’ai vérifié sur Google après qu’il m’ait glissé en salle de réveil que c’était la deuxième fois qu’il le faisait.

Je me traînais pendant des semaines. Dans ce silence, j’ai arrêté de boire. Pas de décision. Pas de drame. J’avais peur de tomber. J’avais besoin de tous mes moyens. Alors j’ai arrêté.

(Je ne regrette pas du tout.)

Mon fils ado a emménagé sans l’annoncer. Il commençait juste à être là plus souvent. Un carton de supermarché plein de slips et fringues assortis. Puis il était juste là. Je n’ai pas demandé pourquoi. Je crois que je savais déjà.

Je suis calme maintenant. Probablement moins désagréable à côtoyer.

C’est tout ce conte, en synthèse. Pas les licenciements, la bibine, les sibériens, les genoux. On s’en fout mais les gens que j’aime se sont rapprochés.

Il y a tellement de gourous qui pipeautent sur la résilience, rebondir, se recadrer les choses. On s’en fout aussi.

Mais.

Ça ne se traverse qu’avec des gens qui te posent les questions auxquelles tu veux pas répondre. J’y suis passé avec des larmes, des séances difficiles, et des amitiés chiantes et inévitables. Des décennies en retard, me voici.

Tout arrive au bon moment. Sauf si t’es déjà mort. Alors, dépêche-toi. Doucement.

Et toi, tu portes encore un fardeau et que tu fais semblant qu’il n’existe pas?

Share The Quiet Frame

Yesterday I grew exasperated by the quality of my LinkedIn feed.

A reasonable reaction would have been to prune what I follow to get relevant content. I do not know how to do that in bulk and found it more fun to come up with a taxonomy of LinkedIn archetypes that I shared here: https://bit.ly/linkedin-bullshit

It turned out to be an introspective exercise. It showed I was as guilty as everyone else and felt the duty to change my pseudo-confident tagline to a humbler “Building quiet things. Perhaps, relevant.”

Low on expectations, dopamine overdose. My subscriber count exploded with other bored folks on a Sunday afternoon.

Behind the satire, though, there is a point. The world is loud. Yours doesn’t have to be.

To see clearly, you have to pause and observe. If I can avoid creating more noise, that is a first step. (I am aware that I am writing a newsletter article.)

Deprived of Premier League action, it occurred to me that building a tool that converts mundane facts into LinkedIn posts might prove how noisy the world really is.

So I did: thequietframe.com/linkedin-bullshit Here are the instructions:

1. Input a mundane fact.

2. Click generate.

3. See the nonsense generated by AI.

4. Do what you want with it. Nobody sees what you type. The data is deleted. Unless you share.

P.S.: To test the thing, I entered: I was constipated and finally took a shit this morning.

© Michel Heitzmann - These are cows, actually, statues of cows in Dallas, TX

LinkedIn is noise. Extraordinary, relentless, self-congratulatory noise. Everyone is broadcasting. Nobody is listening. The feed moves and moves and nothing actually happens. I have been trying to understand what any of it is for and the best I can come up with is this: it makes people feel like they exist. Which is fine. We all need that. But there are quieter ways.

I also suspect that a meaningful portion of the reactions are not reactions at all. They are transactions. Someone tapping a thumbs up out of pure pity, quietly hoping the poster will notice and return the favour. A vast informal economy of reciprocal validation running just below the surface of every post. You scratch my ego, I'll scratch yours.

Which brings me to the content itself.

Advertising. In the time it took me to write the previous paragraph, I scrolled past a bank, some people claiming expertise in energy management, another bank, yet another bank, a social media agency, a fourth bank, a wealth office, an office real estate company and a man who wants to optimise my finances. How can this possibly be effective? I could, purely in the spirit of charity, click on every single ad and help the poor soul at each of those companies dress up a PowerPoint slide about campaign performance. The reality is that none of it moves me in the slightest. It looks less like targeting and more like carpet bombing. Throw enough at the wall and call the one thing that sticks a strategy.

The Joy Reporters. This week I visited a supplier. The atmosphere was remarkable. There was a clear intention behind how the space was built and run. I felt things. Two hundred people reacted. The Joy Reporter does not need news. They need a feeling, something that happened, a moment of human connection that can be stretched into two hundred words and a lesson. The supplier visit. The coffee with a former colleague. The afternoon walk that changed everything. The point is never the supplier.

The Wisdom Dispensers. Being present does not mean being available to everyone all of the time. That is the whole post. Bold font, a line break for dramatic effect, two million impressions. The Wisdom Dispenser has understood something the rest of us have not: the shorter the insight, the less you can argue with it. Nobody can disagree with a sentence that means four different things depending on your mood.

The Concerned Citizens. An old proverb says: when a fool is given a throne, the throne does not gain dignity, the room loses it. Fifty comments. Twelve reposts. The Concerned Citizen does not need to propose a solution. They need a metaphor, a quote from someone dead, and enough ambiguity that the post works regardless of which side of the argument you are on. Half the feed is posting about how the world is ending. The other half is posting about how it is finally being fixed. Both are talking about the same person. Neither is changing a single vote. They are performing for an audience that already agrees with them. Someone is genuinely worried about the Strait of Hormuz closing. If the people directly involved cannot solve it, I am not sure what we are expecting the LinkedIn crowd to do about it.

The Planet Savers. Somewhere in Southeast Asia, a landscape that had been stripped bare for decades came back to life without any human intervention whatsoever. 🌱NATURE First. 🌱 Zero INTERFERENCE. 🌱 The Power of a CLICK. Change your default search engine. The Planet Saver has found a way to save the world that costs them nothing and takes about four minutes to write. The leaf emoji is doing the moral heavy lifting.

The AI Evangelists. AI is going to change everything. AI is going to take your job. AI is going to cure cancer. AI is going to end humanity. AI made me write this post in four minutes. The AI Evangelist discovered the technology sometime in the last two years and has been processing the experience publicly ever since. Every week brings a new list: the ten prompts that will transform your workflow, the five AI tools you are not using but should be, the one thing ChatGPT told them that their therapist never could. The posts are confident, urgent, and always slightly breathless. They read like someone who just got off a rollercoaster and needs you to know it was fast. Somewhere, an AI crawler is already ingesting all of it, learning the pattern, and preparing to generate ten more just like it by now.

The Achievement Announcers. New office in the city centre. From the kitchen table, to a borrowed desk, to this. The journey. The hustle. The emoji of a person lifting weights for reasons nobody has explained. A prestigious consulting firm in the bio, because what you used to be is at least as important as what you are now. Actually, on LinkedIn, it is more important. The ex-badge is the whole point. Former top-tier bank. Former big-four consultancy. Former household tech name, working backwards through a career like a greatest hits tour that peaked some years ago.

The Title Hoarders. Founder | Board Advisor | UN Expert | Global Forum Delegate | Committee Member | AI Strategist | Award Recipient 2023. Seven roles, three acronyms nobody can expand, one award from a body that also gave out four hundred other awards that year. Then there is the category of person who lists every prestigious institution they have ever been adjacent to in their headline, just in case you missed it the first time. And the subset who describe themselves as Highly Skilled, Visionary, Bang-on, Fantastic and Passionate, every adjective self-applied, not one awarded by another human being.

The Formula People. LinkedIn has quietly produced an entire genre of headline that follows the exact same structure: I help [group] [verb] their [noun] so they can [dream]. I help professionals break through their limiting beliefs so they can build the career they actually deserve. I help teams do more without hiring more. I help people look forward to the week ahead. Someone promised to fix the relationship people have with Monday mornings. On a professional network. And thousands connected with them.

The Cosmic Ones. Exploring the next frontier of human consciousness through technology, creativity and ancient wisdom. Regenerative thinking meets indigenous knowledge systems. Bridging quantum possibility with grounded organisational practice. At some point the headline stopped being a job description and became a spiritual manifesto. I have enormous respect for the ambition. I have no idea what any of these people actually do on a Tuesday.

After writing all of the above I looked at my own LinkedIn headline. It said: I connect leadership, AI and sustainability so we can stay clear and act on what's next. I had apparently been one of them the whole time. A Formula Person with delusions of clarity.

I considered changing it to Former Award-Winning Bullshitter. Then I thought better of it as there is an award mentioned.

It now says: Building quiet things. Perhaps, relevant.

I'm still thinking about whether that's any better. But at least it's honest.

Share

© Michel Heitzmann - Aldeia imaginária na neblina

O português é a fala da minha infância, adolescência, de alguns anos de trabalho e de grandes amizades de meio século.

Esses anos formativos são a antítese da minha vida profissional onde tive que me conformar para ter um mínimo de sucesso.

Minha brasileirada faz parte da minha personalidade. Aquela alegria. A cara de pau. As risadas. As injustiças. Os arrivistas. Os sem-vergonhas. O respeito. E o futebol decadente.

Hoje, não tou nem ai, e pergunto. Ouço, sem cinismo, sem pixar, para melhor compreensão.

Aprendi o português nos anos 70 quando estória era conto e história eram o conto dos colonizadores portugueses. Escrevo estórias por ser não conformista.

The Quiet Frame é o que construí quando parei de pedir licença. thequietframe.com

Qualquer semelhança com vilarejos reais, conselhos municipais ou pessoas com copos de vinho na mão falando merda é mera coincidência.

Imagine uma aldeia a 850 metros de altura, uma vista impressionante dos Alpes num canto da Suíça rodeado pela França. Mil e duzentos habitantes e uma porrada de vacas.

Conto duas estórias recentes.

Primeiro, o referendo.

Tentaram aumentar os impostos.

As pessoas por aqui não se mexem pelo coletivo, apesar de respeitá-lo. Na Suíça, as pessoas se movem quando quiserem e se o assunto é de interesse pessoal.

O referendo existe exatamente por isso. Tem referendos nacionais, cantonais e das comunas. Sobre tudo. A energia nuclear, a relação europeia, a piscina da esquina, o custo de jogar fora o lixo. Daqui a pouco votaremos para limitar o número de habitantes na Suíça a 10 milhões. Mal posso esperar chegar a ter 9.999.999 inquilinos, nascerem gêmeos e a gente jogar alguém fora de casa. Pessoal do ICE vai nos ensinar como operar.

Deixo fechar o parêntese e prosseguir com a estória.

É só necessário ter um número suficiente de assinaturas para o assunto aparecer numa próxima votação.

Rebelde como sou, resolvi organizar um referendo intitulado com um populista “chega, já é demais”.

Coletei assinaturas. Levei portada na cara. Expliquei a mesma coisa 179 vezes. Errei. Tive que recomeçar com os formulários certos, respeitando os procedimentos.

Foi uma goleada: 7 a 3. Gente, populismo é demais!

E fui eleito para o conselho da comuna.

O conselho é a legislatura do vilarejo. Não fui bem-vindo.

E aí vem a segunda estória.

Esse conselho municipal se reúne em noites de semana às 20h a cada alguns meses. Uma assembleia de cidadãos eleitos com a função de debater e aprovar recomendações do executivo.

Na prática, carimba tudo. Segue o roteiro sob a orquestração do chefe local — uma figura que não vou descrever em detalhes, porque apesar de ser uma história inspirada por semelhanças, o sujeito não os merece.

Cinco funcionários municipais na frente defendendo absurdos com a maior cara de pau. Paineis de “especialistas” quando necessário. Pauta. Slides projetados tortos na parede. Nem um retângulo direito conseguem.

Pomposo até o nojo. Monsieur X aqui, Madame Z ali — apesar de todo mundo se conhecer pelo primeiro nome na rua.

Perguntas permitidas só se o cidadão se levantar.

Debate? Não muito. Tudo parece resolvido antes de alguém chegar.

Um grupo fechado manda nesse vilarejo imaginário há anos, não porque são poderosos. Mas porque são disciplinados.

Quando só 40 a 45 por cento do eleitorado vota, 20 por cento dedicados e concentrados em poucas famílias é suficiente para ganhar tudo, sempre.

Participei durante meses desse tal conselho. De pé, fiz perguntas. Recebi respostas aplaudidas que não eram respostas. Trouxe problemas. Me disseram que não era o formato. Votei. Perdi por margens gigantescas. Formei o hábito de não escutar e votar sempre contra.

E aí, foi a gota d’água.

O orçamento anual total do povoado é de alguns milhões discretos. Numa assembleia interminável, o executivo pede para contrair uma dívida de 1 milhão para refazer a infraestrutura de uma rua que serve 5 casas, enquanto existem umas 365. O argumento: “vote a favor, senão precisamos refazer a avaliação e isso demora.” Dei uma gargalhada, votei contra, perdi.

O sistema não está quebrado. Está funcionando exatamente como foi projetado.

Minha carta de demissão deu um único motivo. A Champions League era um uso melhor do meu tempo.

Quando a dissidência não é permitida e as pessoas não querem ouvir, você não muda nada por dentro.

Você se desgasta, derrotado por design. Vira curiosidade, um pé no saco ou pior, piada.

Sua presença, mesmo em oposição, dá ao teatro a sua plateia. O sistema precisa que você exista para que ele seja legítimo. Isso num povoado suíço, onde o pior que pode acontecer é eu ficar puto por alguns minutos.

Mal posso imaginar o russo no fronte, o democrata americano surfando a onda fascista, o iraniano terrorizado por explosões ou o cubano com corte de luz, todos eles em condições pouco invejáveis.

No meu casinho suíço, o jeito foi chega, e vai pra pqp.

Que mediocridade ainda tem o privilégio da sua presença?

© Michel Heitzmann - The made up village in the fog

Non, en français !

Eu quero ler em português

Any resemblance to actual villages, councils, networks or people holding wine glasses is purely coincidental.

Imagine a village at 850 metres, an impressive view of the Alps in a corner of Switzerland surrounded by France. Twelve hundred inhabitants and a shitload of cows.

Two recent stories.

First, the referendum.

They tried to raise taxes.

People here do not move for the collective, despite respecting it. In Switzerland, people move when it is in their personal interest. The referendum exists for exactly this reason. National, cantonal, local. On everything. You just need enough signatures for the matter to appear on the next ballot.

So they tried to raise taxes, already very high. Rebel that I am, I organised a referendum titled with a populist “enough, this is too much.”

Collecting signatures meant getting insulted at doors. It meant explaining the same thing 179 times. It meant making mistakes and starting over with the right forms, following the right procedures.

We won by a huge margin. I got elected to the council.

The council is the legislature of the village. I was not welcome.

Second story.

The council meets on weekday evenings at 20:00, or 8 PM for those across the big, beautiful ocean, every few months. An assembly of elected citizens with the job of debating and approving executive recommendations.

In practice, it rubber stamps everything. Follows the script under the orchestration of the local chief — a figure I will not describe in detail, because despite this being a story inspired by resemblances, the person does not deserve it. Five municipal officers at the front defending absurdities with complete shamelessness. Expert panels when needed. Agenda. Slides projected crooked on the wall. They could not manage a straight rectangle.

Pompous to the point of nausea. Monsieur X here, Madame Z there — despite everyone knowing each other by first name in the street.

Questions permitted only if the citizen stands.

Debate? Not really. Everything seems decided before anyone arrives.

A closed group has run this imaginary village for years, not because they are powerful. Because they are disciplined.

When only 40 to 45 percent of the electorate votes, 20 percent concentrated in the right families is enough to win everything, every time.

I participated for months. Standing, I asked questions. Got applauded answers that were not answers. Brought issues. Was told that was not the format. Voted. Lost by enormous margins. Developed the habit of not listening and always voting against.

And then, the last straw.

The total annual budget is in the single digit millions. In an interminable assembly, the executive asks to raise a 1 million debt to redo the infrastructure of a road serving 5 houses, out of roughly 365. The plea: “please vote for it, otherwise we need to redo the assessment and that takes time.” I laughed, voted against, lost.

The system was not broken. It was working exactly as designed.

My resignation letter gave one reason. Champions League was a better use of my time.

When dissent is not allowed and people do not want to listen, you change nothing from inside.

You wear yourself down, defeated by design. You become a curiosity, a nuisance, or worse, a joke.

Your presence, even in opposition, gives the theater its audience. The system needs you there to be legitimate. This in a Swiss village, where the worst that can happen is that I get annoyed for a few minutes.

I can barely imagine the Russian at the front, the American democrat surfing the fascist wave, the Iranian terrorised by explosions, or the Cuban with no power — all of them in considerably less enviable conditions.

In my little Swiss life, the move was enough, and fuck it.

And now, with the invented stories behind us, my conclusion.

Withdrawal is not silence or defeat. When survival is assured, things change from outside. Through mechanisms and audiences the system cannot control. Aimed at the right people and with arguments they actually recognise.

Dissent is a lonely activity. That is not a problem. It is the condition for clarity.

The question is not whether the system deserves your presence. The question is whether you are willing to fight when it does not.

What mediocrity still has the privilege of your presence?