I started November 2nd with a clean slate.
Literally.
A date. A title. An empty list.
And for whatever reason, I wrote The Green Mile in green.
Why?
No profound reason whatsoever. I had just found a pair of green pants, and apparently that was enough for my brain to make the connection.
Perhaps that is a fitting way to start Mike’s Mind anyway. Not every breadcrumb has to mean something when you first drop it. Sometimes you follow it for a while and discover whether it goes anywhere.
And today my mind went everywhere.
Who Is Running the Simulation?
Yesterday I finished one of the books by Mike Hockney about the idea that reality might be a simulation.
It was short. Depending on the font size on my ebook reader, absurdly short or merely quite short. I came away with mixed feelings, mostly because I wanted more.
Which is ironic because there is plenty more. Many more books, in fact.
And I keep saying they rather than he, because part of me still imagines these books coming from some sort of collective mind. Which is strangely appropriate, given the premise.
Who created the simulation?
What is base reality?
Who are the simulators?
And what if, in some peculiar way, the answer is us?
Not you and me personally sitting behind some cosmic computer, obviously. I mean the broader possibility that consciousness is less individual than it seems. A hive mind. The One divided into many. The dreamer entering its own dream.
I don’t know.
And that distinction matters.
These are thoughts, not conclusions.
I’ve explored simulation theory repeatedly in Mike’s Mind before, including the possibility that what we perceive as reality might be more interface than foundation. So I’m aware of another danger here: repetition. My own archive occasionally recommends a post to me and I think, Wait, didn’t I already write about this?
Maybe that’s when the simulation resets.
If the Infinite has already dreamed everything there is to dream, perhaps someone presses New Game.
Fortunately, judging by the current state of Earth, I think we still have plenty of levels left.
It Takes a Village
From cosmic parenting, my mind rather naturally went to actual parenting.
Yesterday I let Nadia do some shopping by herself.
Not entirely by herself. I was still following at a distance, just enough to keep an eye on her without taking over.
She did brilliantly.
She paid attention crossing the streets. Cars stopped at the zebra crossing. She waved. People noticed her.
And I noticed them noticing her.
That old expression suddenly felt less like a cliché:
It takes a village to raise a child.
We don’t technically live in a village. We live in a neighborhood inside a district inside The Hague, inside South Holland, inside the Netherlands, inside Europe, inside this tiny blue planet we keep dividing into increasingly specific pieces.
Zoom in far enough and everything has a boundary.
Zoom out far enough and the boundaries begin to look rather silly.
Religious. National. Political. Cultural. Generational.
Useful distinctions sometimes, dangerous ones at others.
Because when a seven-year-old crosses a road, none of that matters. For a few seconds, there is just a child and a collection of adults making sure she gets safely to the other side.
That’s the village.
There are reminders that the village isn’t automatically safe. Cars still fly through streets where they shouldn’t. I’ve heard stories about violence nearby, although I don’t know enough about the specifics to repeat them as fact.
But yesterday I saw the opposite.
A community quietly doing what communities ought to do.
And I was proud of Nadia.
And, strangely, a little proud of everyone else too.
The Paradox of Letting Go
Parenting may be one of the strangest exercises in controlled surrender.
You spend years protecting a child so that, eventually, they won’t need your protection.
You hold their hand so they can learn to let go.
This morning we had another tiny version of that negotiation.
Nadia wanted entertainment in the car. First chess, which is admittedly an enormous upgrade over endless random screen tapping. Then she wanted to bring a book.
A book!
Part of me should have celebrated. Finally, she wants to read voluntarily.
And yet I still said no.
Not because reading is bad. Quite the opposite.
I wanted her to experience something increasingly rare:
boredom.
Just sit there.
Look outside.
Think.
Invent something.
Let your mind become mildly uncomfortable until it starts entertaining itself.
I know that sounds ridiculously old-fashioned coming from a technology guy. But perhaps that’s precisely why I care about it.
I’ve already given this habit another name: appstraction. That moment when you pick up a device for one purpose, automatically open an app, and lose the thought that made you reach for the device in the first place. I wrote about exactly that battle for attention in an earlier Mike’s Mind.
Sometimes creativity needs an empty screen.
Nadia wasn’t particularly impressed with my philosophy this morning.
She got angry in her own way.
Fair enough.
But before she walked into school, we did our little window routine. Hearts through the glass. Connection restored.
Letting go doesn’t mean disconnecting.
At 3 A.M., Nobody Is Watching
Perhaps boredom was on my mind because last night I had rather too much of it.
I woke up around three.
That turned out to be useful because I’d forgotten my medicine. Less useful was my realization, far too late, that I’m supposed to swallow it instead of biting it.
Terrible idea.
Do not recommend.
Then came the familiar problem: how do you persuade a brain that has unexpectedly booted at 3 a.m. to shut itself down again?
My sleep app later gave the night a score of 60.
Interesting thing, sleep scores.
Do I feel tired because I slept badly, or do I feel more tired because an app officially informed me I slept badly?
Either way, I was awake.
The night before, I’d watched Nadia playing Just Dance with Maarten. They were having such fun that at three in the morning I thought:
Nobody is watching.
Perfect.
So I danced.
Physical by Dua Lipa.
Or Dua Lupa, apparently, if you let my half-asleep pronunciation take over.
And somewhere between trying to follow the movements and figuring out a controller that my children probably consider obvious, I had one of those small technology moments I love.
The interface is really good.
Lyrics here. Instructions there. Movement. Feedback. Music.
You stop thinking about the controller and start doing the thing.
That’s what good technology should eventually become: invisible enough that the intention survives the interface.
Keyboard Brain, Controller World
Controllers still make me feel about ninety years old.
Give me a keyboard and mouse and muscle memory takes over. I’ve spent decades with those. Give me a game controller and suddenly I’m staring at buttons wondering which symbol some teenager expects me to press.
My son sometimes thinks I’m pretending.
Maybe a little.
But mostly not.
I’m a Xennial. We grew up across the fault line. Analog to digital. Pre-internet to internet. Keyboards to touchscreens. Local software to cloud. Physical media to streaming. My archive has returned to that Xennial bridge before because it keeps explaining why old and new technology can both feel native to me, just in different ways.
And perhaps that’s why I keep imagining better interfaces.
Typing a password with a controller is horrible.
Scanning a QR code instead? Better.
Controlling a machine by thought?
Now we’re drifting into the kind of territory where I get excited and cautious at exactly the same time.
Because the ultimate interface might be no interface.
Intent in.
Action out.
Wonderful.
Terrifying.
Probably both.
Life’s Good, Apparently
That train of thought brought me to an LG screen.
LG.
Life’s Good.
Except I remembered that wasn’t where the name originally came from. My rambling recollection took me through Lucky something, GoldStar, chemicals and corporate history before eventually returning to Life’s Good.
And regardless of the corporate etymology, I like the phrase.
Life’s good.
Not my life.
Not life for the lucky few.
Life, full stop.
That may be one of the questions underneath all my technology fascination.
Will AI actually help make life good?
Not only faster. Not only more productive. Not merely more profitable or entertaining.
Good.
For everyone?
I don’t know. Perhaps eventually. Perhaps not automatically.
That is where thought leadership ought to live, I think. Not in predicting which model gets the next ten benchmark points, but in asking what all this technology is supposed to be for.
That question runs through a lot of my writing already. I’ve repeatedly come back to technology as something that should augment people rather than merely impress them.
Ten Euros Into Another World
And naturally, thinking about interfaces eventually returned me to games.
Ubisoft made Just Dance.
Ubisoft also made Watch Dogs.
I’ve never played Watch Dogs, but I’ve been curious about it for ages, and suddenly there I was browsing editions.
Standard.
Deluxe.
Gold.
Complete.
One site wanted a ridiculous amount. Another price looked almost suspiciously cheap.
I investigated just enough to make myself comfortable, reached checkout, watched the VAT appear, selected iDEAL, scanned the QR code and…
€10.15.
Payment successful.
Yesterday I impulsively bought a short philosophical book about simulated reality.
Today I impulsively bought a videogame about hacking a technologically mediated city.
There is probably a joke in there somewhere.
Maybe even a pattern.
Or perhaps just another coincidence that my brain enjoys because brains are excellent pattern-making machines.
Either way, I started this entry with an empty list and something called The Green Mile that meant absolutely nothing.
Then I wandered through simulated universes, collective minds, zebra crossings, fatherhood, boredom, sleep scores, Dua Lipa, controllers, Xennials, LG screens, AI abundance and finally into a videogame.
No wonder I like having a task at hand.
When I’m deeply focused, the wandering stops.
But I’m beginning to think the wandering has its own purpose too.
Boredom gives Nadia somewhere for her imagination to go.
A sleepless hour gives me enough privacy to dance badly at three in the morning.
A strange book lets consciousness wander outside the boundaries of what we call reality.
And an empty list lets the mind reveal what was apparently already waiting underneath it.
Maybe that was the Green Mile after all.
Not a destination.
Just a path through the simulation that turned green because I happened to be wearing the right pants.
And then my doctor called.
Reality apparently wanted me back.
What's on your mind?