The Temple of Not Knowing

[00:00:00] Hi and welcome to Fall asleep with Henrik. I'm Henrik and you're sleepy and it is what it is. What happens happens and right now there's a thing we can do. Let's go.

[00:00:23] Hi sleepy. Hi and welcome back to my humble abode. I'm Henrik and I'm as usual going to talk for an hour and you can do whatever you want. You can drift in and out. You can notice what I say. You can like what I say. You can dislike what I say. You can drift away.

[00:01:03] You can put me on in another room and just let me keep you company that way. Anyhow, everything is fine. And if I do want one thing, it's to be this partner with you, in this partnership with you where I am not demanding anything of you.

[00:01:29] As with me in regards to myself in this podcast, I don't really demand much about myself, of myself. When I record these episodes, I just press play and then I talk and what happens, happens.

[00:01:47] I think we need places in this day and age to seek refuge in when the demand is too great, is too grand. Is it uncertain times? Is it fair to say, sleepy, that we live in uncertain times?

[00:02:09] I'm always a bit. I'm always a bit. I'm always a bit against panicking, you know, running around saying everything is going, you know, it's a major shit storm, everything.

[00:02:31] I'm sure that there have been shit storms throughout history. I'm sure that people have woken up one morning looking into the future, not knowing what's it going to be. I'm sure this has happened before, but I guess we're in one of those moments right now.

[00:02:50] And I keep saying on this podcast that I know nothing and I think I mean it, but lately I have started to wonder what would it mean to actually live like not knowing as a way of life.

[00:03:12] Right now I can say, I don't know, you know, and I can seek refuge in that when there's stuff that I can't control. I don't know anyway, I can say and frog.

[00:03:29] But what if I were to make that sort of the way I live in a different way, not just something that I say when the world is uncontrollable? Well, it's one thing to admit you don't know. And it's another thing to wake up in the morning and let the don't knowingness of it all be the floor that you stand on.

[00:03:58] I'm not sure I've ever managed a whole day of not knowing, truly not knowing, maybe an hour here and there. There's a feeling in the air these days. I don't really like to say these days. But most people seem to have it.

[00:04:20] This sense that the ground is a little less solid than it used to be, maybe. I don't know. I can't point to one thing and say there, that's the cause, you know. It's too complicated. It's more like this overall feeling.

[00:04:49] But I recently noticed in myself that I have stopped expecting the next year to look like this one. When I was small, the future was a place that you walked toward. Like a town at the end of a road. And you could more or less picture the buildings, you know, way up there.

[00:05:18] It would take me a while to get there, but some of the buildings I could see quite clearly. But somewhere, I don't know where, along this road, it all went into fog. I don't know when this happened. Or whether the fog was always there and I only just noticed it.

[00:05:46] Perhaps this is a grown-up thing, sleepy. Perhaps every grown person eventually looks up and sees that there was never really a clear town. Future town. Uncertain times. Okay. Should I dwell on this uncertainness?

[00:06:14] Now, before I continue, just because I talk about uncertain things doesn't mean that I'm here to shake you to your core in any way. If you for some reason think that uncertainty is a bad choice of themes for a podcast episode that aims to put you to sleep, then you can choose another episode. Or maybe, maybe just try and stand your ground now, you know.

[00:06:44] Because stuff will be uncertain. Things will change whether you like it or not, whether you're about to go to sleep or not. I'm, I don't know if I told you this, but I'm originally an actor. Yeah, I've been nagging about that.

[00:07:07] But I, I have spent years on stages saying lines, lines that I did not write.

[00:07:21] And the strange thing about this profession, acting, is that the premise is that you walk into a scene not actually knowing what will happen, even though you know every word. The not knowing is what makes it alive. That's the craft.

[00:07:48] If I knew exactly how a scene would land, I think I would be, well, it wouldn't be good acting. It wouldn't be good theater. Maybe it would help if we looked on life a bit like that. That unknowing is the part that keeps us alive.

[00:08:08] Maybe not knowing how that foggy, used to be clear image of the future town would be more tolerable to us if we just accepted the fact that there's just this fact that we can't control. And that is, we have to deal with unknown things. That's part of what keeps us alive, gives us life.

[00:08:42] It's a bit how I make this podcast as well. I sit down without a plan and I start talking and I really don't know where it's going to go. And for some reason in this context of me recording, talking to you, Sleepy, someone I've never met, somewhere perhaps on the other side of the planet,

[00:09:11] somehow that makes me calm, comfortable. I trust it, you know. Although I don't know anything. And of course there are, you know, trap doors that I could fall through. There's risk involved. I could say something that really upsets someone with different context than me.

[00:09:37] This has happened in the history of the podcast over the 100 plus episodes that I've recorded. I have, for instance, meddled in American domestic policies. I've said, I spoke my mind on that. And I got taught, you know, I got told, you don't know, please stop lecturing us. You know, and also about God.

[00:10:08] That's the biggest backlash I've had in the history of this podcast, I guess. And I really took it to heart. So many people have a relationship with God that me in my own secular way has. Because I've lived that way. I'm raised Catholic. My parents are still Catholics. And so I've been there, you know.

[00:10:38] That's why maybe because I've left that world, partly at least, that gives me sort of an angle that is... Yeah, some people... Yeah, some people have told me that this is disrespectful. And I don't mean to be disrespectful. I mean to respect everyone's beliefs. I do.

[00:11:02] The world is filled with people sitting on high horses telling everybody else that they're wrong. And I don't want to be one of them. I don't. I really don't, Sleepy. If I say something that, for some reason, you know, pushes your button in one way or another, please try and remember that I don't know anything. This is just me talking. I don't matter. I really don't matter in this sense.

[00:11:31] I matter like everyone else matters, but not in the sense that my voice in this podcast episode would really make a difference in your world. If it does, it does. But if it doesn't, then that's fine, you know. But it's about the unknowingness right now, right?

[00:11:55] I'm not here to ask forgiveness for past trespassings, past mistakes. They're not even mistakes, really. I think a lot of what we call anxiety is just imagination that got loose

[00:12:21] and started building something of their own. You know, the mind is very good at picturing the thing that, the very thing that hasn't happened yet in detail, with the lighting and sound and music even. So we go around and we rehearse disasters that never come.

[00:12:48] And then the disaster that does come, it's always a surprise and we haven't rehearsed. This is true, right? So I read somewhere that there's a difference between risk and true uncertainty.

[00:13:12] Like risk is when you don't know what will happen, but you know the odds. Like you toss a coin and you know, like it will be either, you know, either this or that. But true uncertainty is when you don't even know what the possibilities are.

[00:13:40] And most of life, the real parts, they are the second true uncertainty. But we keep treating them like the first, like it's a coin. That really comforts me in a way.

[00:14:09] It comforts me because then my imagination, which almost always paints a very grim picture of what's about to happen, it's either this or that. The coin will flip in either this or that side when it hits the ground. But if I think of it as endless, like possibilities are endless,

[00:14:34] or at least if not endless, so at least like really very complex and varied. And that I can be sure that there's no way that I can tell the true outcome of anything really. Well, maybe a coin, tossing a coin. But we treat risk like we know.

[00:15:05] Like it will be either one of two outcomes. And then we reach for our phones. And I don't want to trash talk phones. I love phones. But we reach for them. As soon as we feel uncertain,

[00:15:30] we ask this little glowing rectangle what's happening. Like it was an oracle or something. As if it could tell us how the story ends. I do this all the time. And of course, this can't happen. It just gives us more of the middle, you know, endlessly.

[00:16:01] And we keep scrolling for the part where someone finally explains it all. But somehow that never happens, isn't it? I have that, in a sense, with AI. A part of me expects AI to solve every question that I have. Every nook and cranny of my mind will be straightened out and explained. But it never happens.

[00:16:30] As soon as something is straightened out, something new, weird and dark are called into mind. And I really like it that way. I really like to have shadows. Shadows in my corners.

[00:16:58] And we don't do this with every aspect. Like sleep, for instance. Every night we lie down and we agree to lose consciousness. And we love it even. And we strive. If we are sleep-deprived, then we really long for this unconscious state to let go of the controls completely. And we're not ever guaranteed of how the night will go

[00:17:27] or what we will be, what the world will be like when we wake up. We're doing the most uncertain thing there is on purpose. And we call that rest. At the same time, we just can't stand uncertainty when we're awake. When I meditate, when I try to meditate, which I do badly,

[00:17:57] the instruction is mostly to stop trying to fix the moment and just let it be whatever it is. And that sounds... I mean, before I started practicing, I really hated that. Because it's just... It's so easy to say, you know? Just look at the moment. Leave it be, you know? It's so easy to say,

[00:18:27] and it's almost impossible to do. Like the whole mind wants to lean forward into the next second and arrange it. To sit in the front seat and do the driving. I think there's a kind of false certainty

[00:18:56] that we strive for. Like, as a comfort. The certainty of a strong opinion. A clear enemy. A tidy story about why everything went wrong. It feels good. Yeah, it feels really good.

[00:19:26] And it also makes us a little stupid and a little cruel, I think. And I wonder why we were built that way. At some point, this must have been like a good thing for us. To be able to treat risk like tossing a coin. To be able to find easy... easy to tell stories behind why stuff are the way they are.

[00:19:59] But I don't think that we really benefit from it anymore. We really are in the driver's seat in a way that we haven't ever been as far as we've been a species. They tell... They... Like... If you turn on the weather channel

[00:20:26] and the forecaster tells us that tomorrow will be sun, we believe them. And they are wrong. Like all the time. And we keep believing them anyway. There's this sense that if we know what weather will be like, then... We have control. Yeah. I feel a bit harsh now criticizing this.

[00:20:56] I mean, it's also something really sweet. It's something tender about that. That we need someone to say tomorrow will be rain. You know? We need someone to tell us that in order to feel safe. We don't really need them to be right. We just need them to make the forecast. You know? It's not the way...

[00:21:27] It's not the fact, the level of truth in the forecast. It's the confidence and the fact that they just do the forecast. But a tree doesn't know if there will ever be a spring.

[00:21:58] It has no way to know that. And yet, every year on no evidence whatsoever, it begins to like push out small green attempts. That's just chemistry, of course. It has nothing to do with trust or courage or whatever. But it's sometimes I think that

[00:22:28] we would benefit more from being more like trees. So it's this time now. I will just begin to push out small little green nubbins all over my body because I don't know why. I've been sober for some years now. And

[00:22:58] one of the only things that ever helped was to stop trying to promise myself anything about the whole rest of my life. I mean, initially when I stopped drinking, that was unbearable. wringly heart, I downloaded an app and I started counting the days

[00:23:27] and I initially said, I don't really remember what time span I set in the first round. No, actually, you know what I did? I actually googled, I don't know if I told you this, but I love you dog. Sorry. I don't know if I told you this in an earlier episode, but I

[00:23:58] read somewhere that there was in the pipeline researchers were inventing this synthetic variant of alcohol that would be unharmful in the same way that alcohol was. So the first time I decided to get sober, like for real, not just a month or two, then I said to myself that when this synthetic

[00:24:26] alcohol hits the market, then I will start using that instead. So I will wait because I need my health. So that was like my engine running in the beginning and that product never hit the market. I don't know what happened. The guy developing it was called Dr. Nut. This is actually true, I think, as far as I

[00:24:56] remember anyway. This was back in 2017. I could remember wrong, but yeah, I think his name was Nut. His surname was Nut. And for some reason this idea must have been Nutty because it never happened. maybe got bought up, you know, stopped in the pipeline by alcohol companies. I don't know. I have no idea and I don't really care anymore, but I did back then.

[00:25:27] But it took its time, you know, to hit the market and my life just kept going. And all of a sudden I looked at my app where I checked the days sober and then I've been sober for a thousand days and I couldn't believe how fast that went by. And then I just lost all interest because life kept going, you know. Yeah, so then I

[00:25:57] had to, yeah, that was the certain, the false sense of certainty that I had when I stopped drinking. I painted this clear city in the future where being drunk was just a positive thing, not the hurtful downsides, the hurtful, the harmful, hurtful as well. So that was false certainty.

[00:26:27] Yeah, so it's a good thing as well. I wouldn't have, if I, if I picture like eternity, the rest of my life, you know, maybe I wouldn't have been able to stay sober, I don't know. But it's, it's also kind of, I was kind of fed up, you know, with the drug. I was kind of fed up with who I became this clingy, passionate, longing,

[00:26:57] thirsty person. Enough was never enough. I cried a lot. Yeah, I cry a lot as well, now too. But, but this guy, there was no bottom in him really, and I didn't like that guy. So, it was, it would maybe have been easier even if, easy, even if I didn't have the sense of false

[00:27:26] certainty led by Dr. Knott. But we have built an entire industry around the promise of certainty, like coaches and courses and the people who will sell you a system proved by science that will change your life in seven steps. And I understand the hunger that they are feeding. I have felt it, maybe I'm even a part of it,

[00:27:57] but I've started to mistrust anyone who is sure about anything, who is sure about how I should live because the surest people, it's such an unattractive trade, don't you think, to be totally sure about something? We all know that someone that always has an answer.

[00:28:26] You ask something or you just share something, it might not even be a question, you just share something and he immediately starts explaining to you how it all works and you can't remember even asking, you know, you just shared, you know, a thought, a dilemma maybe. My daughter, she's a teenager and

[00:28:57] she has like the whole thing in front of her and it's unwritten and it's heartbreaking and also I kind of envy her in a way but also I don't, I don't want to do it all again, believe me, I don't, I mean all the uncertainty that she represents right now, I watch her stand at the edge of all that,

[00:29:28] there's so much not yet, not yet, you know, but who am I until then and the eagerness and the frustration of not coming in the future, not arriving fast enough, no, I don't envy it and I don't pity it as well either, I mean, I just, it's just huge, you know, it's just

[00:29:57] huge to be a witness, I want to tell her something useful and I try like all the time but I never know what to say and recently I'm not good at this, I want to be the one that, you know, gives her epiphanies, that has always been my role

[00:30:27] in the life of the people around me, I am a wise boy, I've been a wise boy, I remember having that relationship with my sister, when we were younger, she turned to me and she asked me stuff and I preached, I told her what it was like, what she should think and she always said, oh, you're so wise, what would I do without you? And I just,

[00:30:56] you know, I drank that, I drank that from her hands, really, if I'm being honest, I can't help her, you know, that's a hard thing, that's a hard nut to crack, how do I help her, not knowing how to

[00:31:26] help her, because what she's going through, I mean, there are stuff that she obviously needs help with, but it's mostly practical things now, drive her there, pick her up there, buy this, explain to her how the dishwasher works, you know, it's all the other stuff, the stuff that I think, at least I think that I had something to say and

[00:31:56] contribute in her life when she was younger, all the fluffiest things in life, the philosophies, the wanderings, you know, I don't have any say in that anymore because now she's at a point when this is her own world and I can't help her, but I can see that she's struggling with the world,

[00:32:27] I can see that she's, you know, she's taking on the world and I want to help her fight and conquer and learn, bow down to facts, but I can't do any of that, it's up to her, so my own challenge that I bestowed

[00:32:57] upon me is to let that go, except that I don't know how I can help her and if I help her, I help her, you know, but I don't expect anymore to be the one bringing the solution, and I think of all the things that I've talked about here now, this is the most painful,

[00:33:27] I really wish that I could carry her, you know, at the same time, no, I don't, I mean, it's, I don't want to carry her, I want her to move by her own accord, I want her to take on the world as she does, I want this to happen, I'm not like, I'm not an idiot, you know, I want her to be an independent

[00:33:57] person eventually, but it's hard, all this doubt, am I a good parent, am I a bad parent, like, it's a coin that you throw, it's either this or that, doubt, doubt, doubt has a bad reputation, as if

[00:34:27] it were the opposite of faith, like, doubt is the thing that eats faith, but I have started to think that doubt is maybe what faith is made of, like, the way a muscle is made, is built out of the

[00:34:57] resistance that it works against, a belief, a belief that has never been doubted, is not really a belief, is it? That's just unreflected habit, something that you haven't examined, and that's not true belief, he said, all knowingly, scratching

[00:35:26] his beard, his long white beard, that I wish that I had, but I don't. I can't really grow a beard sleepy. That's one of my major regrets in life, that I didn't start using anabola or something. Anabola? Can you say that in English? I don't know. I'm talking about steroids, and of course I'm joking, I am joking, I haven't ever,

[00:35:57] and I won't, but I read somewhere when I was a teenager that the only way to be able to grow more beard, more hair on your body, is to start using steroids, and I never did, so I can jokingly say that I regret not using steroids in my youth, but of course, again, you don't know me, so I don't want you to mistake me for someone

[00:36:25] who really regrets not having used steroids. steroids. I have this acquaintance actually that in his youth used steroids, and his last time I met him, he was a mess, so I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, regardless of how much body hair that you might or might not develop, develop, but I would really love to have this white, flowing beard, also I would love to have thicker,

[00:36:56] denser hair, as I age, my hair gets like duck feathers, you know, like these fragile, small, thin feathers from a baby duck, that's my hair nowadays, but I guess that happens with old people. My granddad, he had

[00:37:26] a very receding hairline, and when he died, he actually had a wig, on the woman who he rented his place from, who found him after his heart attack, she didn't recognize him at first because he was bald, he didn't wear a wig at the time of death, that was a bummer, you know, one would wish that one of the greatest insecurities in him would have been covered up even

[00:37:55] at the end, but I guess, it figures. I keep noticing how the old people in my life, the ones who are near the end, if you can say something like that without sounding cynical, but they seem to be, sometimes at least, the least afraid of the fact that

[00:38:25] they don't know anything. you would think that it would be the reverse, that the closer you get to the biggest uncertainty in existence, the end of the existence, the more it would alarm you, but as it seems, we grow into this peace

[00:38:50] by just being exposed for this unchangeable, unchangeable fact, or maybe it's just exhaustion, exhaustion, that's a hard word, exhaustion, exhaust, I'm exhausted from being so wise,

[00:39:19] sorry, when you read a book, you start without knowing the ending, and the same when you write a book sometimes, that's okay, I mean we don't get scared not knowing what's to come at the end of a TV show, or a book, or a film, or any other piece of art,

[00:39:51] then that's fine, uncertainty is fine, there is this thought that has stayed with me, and that is that the gap between how the world sees someone, and how that someone sees themselves,

[00:40:20] they can, they could, it might well be so that they will never align, sometimes, you can be told a hundred times that you are something, and inside you still feel like a little small shaking uncertain person that hasn't caught up, I know that gap, it's my

[00:40:50] gap, and I don't know anything, if it will ever close, I'm not sure that this had anything to do with uncertainty, but then again, this is fall asleep with Henrik, I don't really, there's really no thread, but I want to

[00:41:20] go back to this, this stuff that we love, uncertainty in stories, we love when there's a cliffhanger, you know, because then we will we're just dying to know, but I guess we all want solutions, right,

[00:41:50] even in stories, I'm not sure, maybe it's both, I mean we can watch or read or take part in stories, but what if they would just end abruptly in the middle of the story, then we would hate it, yeah, that's how I feel with the streaming platforms now,

[00:42:19] because they give you season one of something and you attach to it, and then yeah, you'll just know that after episode 10, you will have to wait five years for the next episode, and then you've moved on in life, and no one really cares, because they need to measure the, you know, retention rate or whatever, so that they will know if it's worth the bucks to spend more money, and sometimes I read somewhere that

[00:42:49] it's more of a winning deal to just produce one season and tease about a season two, three, four, it's cheaper just to do the one season and then just forget about it, and I really hate that, yeah, so we really hate when stories just end in the middle of it, we want to keep knowing, we can sit

[00:43:18] through almost anything if we are promised that it resolves, that it resolves, collides with the fact that we live our actual real life, which do not resolve, and that's true about your life, sleepy, and mine, and your neighbors,

[00:43:49] well maybe your neighbor's life resolves, because you can write a story about it, and a story per definition is something that resolves, if it's a good one, and, but your own life, it doesn't resolve, you know, there's no solution, your life just keeps going, and then it stops, and we keep waiting for the part that ties it together, and we can tell

[00:44:19] stories about our own lives as well, we can say, this is the point when I blah blah blah, but that's really just a story, isn't it? It has nothing to do with what's true, in a way, I guess it depends on what you put into the word true, or truth, yeah, my dad, he's very good at

[00:44:47] telling stories about himself, or his family's life, he talks about hardships, and then he twists it so that it means something, and I've always reacted very strongly to that, because I, some part of me has always felt that it's in some way it's a lie, it's not a harmful lie, it's kind of nice and sweet,

[00:45:18] but to take stuff that really hurt you, that almost killed you, that changed you in bad ways, and good ways, and just say that this was because this would happen, you know, I think it's such an easy way, it's a getaway, you know, it's a shortcut, I am very attracted to the way, looking at

[00:45:46] life in a way that I don't really know what happened, I don't know why it happened, maybe there isn't even a why, maybe there's just is, this and that, then, now, you, me, them, that's all there is, and all the rest of it is stories that we need, and I'm not against stories, obviously, because this is what I do,

[00:46:17] but it's worth thinking about, that we really don't need to tell the story about everything, and sometimes the best parts in life, I met this girl once, and I could tell all the stories in the world about our meeting, our time together, but it's unfair,

[00:46:48] because this is bigger than one story, it's like a whole cluster of stories, and that makes me want to question the very story fabric of it all, maybe it's not story material, maybe it's just raw, pure experience, and I don't have to tell the story about it, it's an explosion, you know,

[00:47:13] make plans, and the plans almost never survive contact with the actual week, day, circumstance,

[00:47:39] but we never stop making plans, right? But the plan is not really a prediction, it can be, but a plan is like a declaration that I intend to still be here doing things on Thursday, Thursday, and then the week disagrees, this happens all the time, I mean,

[00:48:08] I told my assistant the other week, next week I'm going to be in the office every day, because I rent a place there and I really want to be there, you know, because otherwise it's money wasted in my book, but then something happens and I just don't, you know, I just can't, I have too much stuff, I really don't need an office, I don't know under which circumstances I could really professionally

[00:48:38] benefit from being around other people, I mean, privately, personally, yes, so much, I really need people around me, but doing this, I need to be alone, so really, if I were to be an efficient creator, I would just sit here, record, day in and day and out,

[00:49:14] a waiting room is, a waiting room is a strange place, it's a temple to not knowing, everything is very still, you read a magazine that you don't care about and you're waiting for the door at the end of the waiting room to open, open, and the person to pop out their head and say a word that will be your, that is

[00:49:44] presumably your name, I'm, I'm tired in my, I'm tired now, I'm, I'm dry in my mind, it's hard for me to pronounce the words, I feel really at the end of the line here, do I have the, what it takes to keep this episode up and running, it's 10 minutes left,

[00:50:16] I don't know, sleepy, if I, if I stop now, this won't be a complete episode, and then that means that you will never hear it, so the fact that you're listening to this episode is proof that I will go all the way, I will deliver, because if I don't deliver, I won't release the episode, I love that way of thinking, right now I am totally uncertain

[00:50:46] if I will ever, if I will make it through these last, these remaining 10 minutes, because of my lack of words, I feel like I am really rolling this Sisyphus project stone up a hill, it's so heavy in my mind right now, and I feel like I'm not coming through, so I am uncertain, I'm thinking

[00:51:16] right now really bad, just pressing stop, regrouping, and do this another day when I'm more not so tired, but the fact that you are listening to this episode means that you're certain, you can be certain, sleepy, that I will go all the hour, I will deliver, and I will do even one more minute, yeah, okay, so I, okay,

[00:51:45] so I promise you this sleepy, you can be certain at this point, that if you're hearing my voice right now, I will go at least one minute over the one hour time limit on this episode, I'm not going to time it like, absolutely time it, oh god, please help me, how will I manage, but I will aim for one hour and one minute

[00:52:14] at least, yeah, so right now I'm having a conversation with you about certainty, and I'm really very close to you, you hear me like close to you, but I am uncertain, and you are certain, so we couldn't be more apart really, and we're also separated by space and time, this is recorded

[00:52:44] before you listen to it, and it's recorded in a position, in a place, maybe far away from you, really far away, that itches in a good way, my brain itches when I think about those things, because right now I'm in this threshold between then and now,

[00:53:15] and uncertainty and certainty, the absolute fact that if you listen to this, then the episode will be the full length and longer, but right now I feel very uncertain, I could stop now, I really could, but now it's six

[00:53:44] minutes left, that would be equivalent to running a race and then just quit, just before the finishing line, I've done this, I've done this before, usually it happens when I have like half an hour of subconsciously criticizing myself and the way I do it, and then all of a sudden I'm just fed up, then I'm just, I usually say a swear

[00:54:14] word in Swedish, and then I rise, I rise up like the bird phoenix, and I rise up from the ashes of my demise, my podcasting demise, my content, non-content creator demise, and I go about my day drinking coffee, wondering how I'm going to help her,

[00:54:44] like this state of total despair, that I don't know how I can carry her further, because I can't, and I shouldn't, and yeah, I think in a way that we have lost some of our tolerance for not knowing, and I guess that's because of a lack of practice,

[00:55:19] maybe in the past, I don't want to romanticize the past, but maybe in a time when news, the cause and effect were more separated, were more separate by time, like everything traveled slowly, and you simply couldn't know how a distant thing or event had turned out for days, maybe even months, and you lived anyway,

[00:55:50] and now we're used to knowing everything immediately. The greatest atrocities and tragedies, we get them as push notices in our phones, like instantly. I remember speaking about the unsure world, I remember this one really scary event that took place a few years back, I'm not going to go into what it was,

[00:56:20] I think we all know what it was, but it was during smartphone era, it was in this era, and I was having lunch, it was a good day, and then my phone just told me that right now this awful thing is going on, and I froze, and I'm not sure that this is the way it's supposed to be, then again, I'm not

[00:56:54] someone who really thinks that there even is such a thing as something that is supposed to be anything, this is just the way it is, so that is bad, but also good, you know, we trust strangers constantly,

[00:57:24] without ever deciding to, I get on a plane and I trust people that I will never meet, the people who built the plane, the people who drive the plane, I cross a bridge and I trust that someone did the calculations necessary, 150 years ago or something, we don't know, we order a coffee and they put the

[00:57:53] lid on and we take the coffee and we don't open the lid and just look into the coffee cup if there even is coffee in there, it could be anything, we don't know the person, but somehow we do, you know, the whole world runs on this invisible web of trust in people we can't see or don't know, that's weird, but then again

[00:58:22] we feel frightened and alarmed by someone with a different skin color or someone that comes from a slightly different place with a slightly different culture or even just someone walking behind us too close on the street or clears their throat too close to us, then we flinch, you know, we back up. Is it a crazy person? Is it a killer clown?

[00:58:53] But we're not at all suspicious that the barista really put another type of liquid in our coffee cups to go cups. Okay, sleepy, so it actually seems like all uncertainty, despite all the uncertainty and my lack of words and my slurry, bad grammar English,

[00:59:23] I have reached the end of this episode, almost, it's a few seconds left, so I could stop now, but what good would that do? I have made it this far and I'm glad I did, because I will never know what you, sleepy, will get out of this episode. Hopefully you're asleep by now, but if you're not, then it has a purpose, I think. Let's just say that

[00:59:52] it's because of something you needed to hear this, these words, these nonsensical words from this Swedish guy, this Swedish dude, boy, man, the boy man in Sweden, Stockholm. the sun is just throwing itself at my windowsill.

[01:00:23] I can feel it on my back, because my back is turned to the window, but I can feel the heat. So when I'm done with this recording, which I will be in approximately 30 seconds, I will go out on my balcony, and I will have a cup of coffee, and I will listen to the sound of the city, and I will not know anything. I don't know anything,

[01:00:53] and it is what it is. What happens happens, and right now, or ever, really, there is nothing we can do. Good night, sweet sleepy. happy.