Fever Dreams and Fault Lines

The strange thing about not writing for six weeks is that the mind doesn’t go quiet. It gets louder.

My last post was February 16 about the Epstein files, about horror, disbelief, and the uncomfortable feeling that the world wasn’t burning with the outrage I expected. Since then, silence on the blog but not in my head. Quite the opposite. Thoughts kept stacking, colliding, dissolving. Ironically, I sometimes felt they didn’t belong on Mike’s Mind. Which is absurd; if it lives in my mind, where else would it belong?

Maybe the pause wasn’t emptiness. Maybe it was overload.

Fever, headlines, and uneasy symmetry

Part of the gap was simple: life. My youngest daughter got sick. A flu, or virus — the kind that moves silently through a household like a whispered rumor. A few days later, it reached me. Four days out. Fever touching 39°C. Headaches. Burning dreams that blur the line between sleep and hallucination.

In that state, the world feels fragile. If someone had told me there was another pandemic starting, I might have believed it instantly. Fever lowers your defenses — not just physically, but mentally. The improbable suddenly feels plausible.

And meanwhile, the news kept moving. The Middle East tensions. The uneasy triangle of the U.S., Israel, and Iran. Nuclear shadows. China watching. Europe observing.

From safe, relatively calm Netherlands, I still feel the ripple. Not fear exactly but calculation. Where will our children study? What does five years look like? Ten? Retirement? Vacation plans even, those trivial things that quietly depend on global stability.

When the world shakes, even small personal decisions feel geopolitical.

Losing and re-evaluating AI

Another shift: my relationship with AI. For someone who has used it constantly, I did something unexpected: I unsubscribed from the paid version. Not dramatically, just quietly.

There’s a subtle unease growing. Watching the alliances, the military ties, the narratives. Wondering about motives. Wondering about power. Wondering whether the technology that once felt like a collaborative intelligence is becoming something else entirely.

And yet, I still believe in the knife analogy: in the hands of a surgeon it saves lives, in the wrong hands it harms. The tool itself is neutral. The story around it never is.

Listening to big thinkers, reading critiques, hearing comedians, watching historians — I find myself oscillating between optimism and suspicion. Between fascination and caution. Between “this will elevate us” and “this could replace us.”

Both can be true. That’s the uncomfortable symmetry.

Immigration and the paradox of similarity

Lately I’ve also been thinking about immigration — and I notice something delicate here. I feel the need to choose words carefully. Not out of fear, but out of responsibility.

Because I hold two experiences at the same time.

On one hand, I see worrying signals. Videos of tension. Cultural clashes. Strong rhetoric. A sense — real or amplified — that societal balance is shifting. As a father, that naturally triggers protective instincts. You think about safety, identity, continuity.

But then I sit at my daughter’s swimming lessons. Or at her international school. And suddenly the abstraction disappears. Indians, Chinese, Arabs, Persians, Europeans — simply parents sitting together. Smiling. Checking phones. Complaining about homework. Talking about holidays. Watching their kids with the same expression: hope mixed with worry.

We are incredibly similar. Almost disappointingly similar.

We want safety. We want happiness for our children. We want food, shelter, a holiday once in a while.

The fundamentals are universal. And yet, paradoxically, we clash.

I see it even within technology niches — developers versus sysadmins, MSPs versus data companies. Different languages, different priorities, different worldviews. If we already struggle to align inside one industry, how much harder is it when the differences touch belief, religion, identity?

Conflict becomes almost statistically inevitable. But inevitability doesn’t mean destiny.

History, uprisings, and quiet hope

Watching history recently, I stumbled upon something I hadn’t fully grasped before: the Romanian uprising. A dictator removed, captured by civilians, tried and executed the same day.

Whatever one thinks of the process, it reminds you of something deeper: power is never absolute. People can still unite. Systems can still shift.

There is always friction between control and collective will. Always a possibility for course correction. Which brings me back to where I started: six weeks of silence.

Not emptiness, just accumulation. Fever dreams blending with geopolitical fault lines. AI doubts mixing with school choices. Immigration concerns dissolving into shared humanity. History reminding me that nothing is fixed.

The mind never stopped, it was just buffering.

And now, writing again, I realize something: the world feels unstable but the act of thinking about it is strangely stabilizing.

Maybe that’s what Mike’s Mind is for after all. Not certainty. Just a place where the noise becomes pattern… and the fever breaks.