Eibergen

8 Feb 202318 Dec 2024 nivtricLeave a comment

Near Enschede, in the east of the Netherlands, is a village called Eibergen. I was born there in Iepenstraat, which means Elm Street. The assassination of US President Kennedy took place on Elm Street, and that event became part of a web of remarkable coincidences. A Nightmare on Elm Street is a horror film first released in the United States on 9 November 1984 (11/9) and in the Netherlands on 11 September 1986 (9/11). 9/11 refers to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, another event marked by an array of remarkable coincidences. These words indicate that this is the beginning of a most peculiar story full of coincidences that aren’t coincidences. And it is a story inside a story.

Eibergen means egg mountains, which could be a cryptic reference to a womb. The initials of my last name, KI, make the Dutch abbreviation for artificial insemination, a way to become pregnant without sexual intercourse so that a virgin can give birth. By the way, it is also the Dutch abbreviation for artificial intelligence. The name of the nearby city, Enschede, may refer to the female reproductive organ. And the initials of my first and middle name, BH, make the Dutch abbreviation for a bra. The song A Boy Named Sue by Johnny Cash is about funny names, particularly of this kind, building strong character. The meaning of songs relates to this story, too.

I lived in Eibergen until the age of four. I recall a little of that time. As far as I remember, nothing unusual happened. You might expect something extraordinary if you know the plot of this story, but it didn’t. Often, I went out on a tricycle to feed the sheep in the pasture at the end of the street. Being a shepherd may have been my calling. I was afraid of the clock on television. If it appeared, I took cover behind the sofa. I remember that my mother was pregnant. She was ironing. My sister Anne Marie was born in 1971. I sang songs for the baby in the baby room while my mother changed diapers.

Our home was in a block of similar houses. Next door lived an older lady, probably in her sixties. She came from the former Dutch Indies and had a fish tank in the living room. On the other side was another young family with children. They had a daughter of my age and a younger son. I remember playing with them. And I once electrocuted myself by putting the chain of the stopper of the kitchen sink into a wall outlet. Others later said I had used scissors, but I am sure it was the stopper’s chain, which then was confirmed by my mother. It suggests my memories are of good quality.

My father went to work around 6 AM and returned around 9 PM. He loved his job. On Saturdays, he often went out with his friends, hunting, I suppose. And so, I hardly saw him. At home, he caught up on his sleep on the couch to wake up when sports started on television. So, when I was three years old, I once said to my mother, jokingly, I suppose, ‘Who is that man sleeping on the couch?’ That is what my mother later told me. My father probably took the hint as I remember that he took me out of bed every morning before he went to work and played with me for a few minutes for a few weeks.

When I was three, I fell on my teeth on the wooden table in the living room in a brutal smash. A piece of the wood broke off. My front teeth turned black shortly afterwards until my permanent teeth came. And so, I became an ugly duckling for years to come. We also had a biking accident. My mother was biking, Anne Marie was in the front, I was in the back, and my mother had trouble handling the bags full of groceries at the handlebar. And then the bike fell over. In early 1973, we moved to Nijverdal, which means ‘industrious valley’. It suggests we left the mountains for a life in a valley, but the Dutch mountains are imaginary, and the name of a song by my favourite band, The Nits. The music you love may reveal your character. And that might be correct in my case.

Latest revision: 18 December 2024

Featured image: my mother, my younger sister, and I (in the foreground)

Joking Jokers

18 Jan 20232 Dec 2025 nivtricLeave a comment

In 2002, I began working as an Oracle database administrator at a government agency. Most people in the Netherlands know about the agency because it processes traffic fines. Therefore, it isn’t popular with the general public, just as the Internal Revenue Service isn’t. If someone asked who my employer was, I kept it vague and said the government or the Department of Justice. It didn’t take long before something went seriously wrong. On my second day on the job, one of the production systems crashed after running the batch jobs, leaving the database corrupt. In hindsight, that was a bit peculiar. After three days of searching, which included a weekend, I still hadn’t found the exact cause. When the operator restored the backup of the previous evening, which was still valid, and ran the batch jobs, the database became corrupt again. It was probably a software bug, so I advised restoring the backup from the previous evening and upgrading the database software to see if that would solve the issue. Instead, the IT director declared a crisis and set up a multidisciplinary task force to address it.

The head of the task force was a corpulent project leader who decided we should find the cause, which I hadn’t uncovered. I just wanted to fix the problem. Every day at 10 AM, there was a meeting to discuss the state of affairs. Every day, I proposed to upgrade the database software to see if it would help. And every day, my proposal was brushed aside. I would have done it myself, but I was a brand-new hire and didn’t have sufficient access rights. And the agency used VAX VMS, an unfamiliar operating system, so I couldn’t install software or restore backups myself. Two weeks later, after the experts had weighed in and after hiring a database corruption expert from Oracle, the cause remained elusive, and managers were getting desperate. Finally, they were willing to consider my suggestion. And it solved the problem. It was a harbinger of things yet to come. During the review, they grilled me for not being interested in researching the cause. I was not a team player and said solving a crisis was more important because it was a production system, so the users needed it to work. And the upgrade demonstrated that it was a software bug.

If you had prejudices about the government, my employer didn’t dispel them. You expect red tape, risk-avoidance, rule-following, and the like. It was all there. One department excelled. If you made the request incorrectly, they would do nothing, even when it was clear what they had to do. You couldn’t disturb them between 10 and 11 AM when they were discussing the work. They didn’t seem to do much, so what did they discuss for 1 hour a day? Everywhere you go, some people work hard, while others take it easy. I have seen people doing little in corporations for profit as well. At my first project at Cap Volmac, we did nothing for months.

Still, I have the impression that the work pace at the government is, on average, slower than in the private sector. It is hard to put a number on it, but there is a difference. There is less pressure. Decisions take time and require more meetings. And whatever you do for your employer is working hours. Cap Volmac required me to invest private time in education and corporate meetings. Finally, government employment is more secure. Some colleagues may remember my so-called crusade against bureaucracy. I often made jokes about bureaucracy and solved problems while ignoring red tape. Still, we perform our job effectively and efficiently, as traffic offenders would agree. And results matter most. Governments are bureaucratic because they implement rules.

When I came to work there, another database administrator, Dirk-Jan, a senior who had done several other jobs and hadn’t been a database administrator for long, was already there. After two months, Kees arrived, and from then on, we were three. Kees had a technical background. A few years later, Rene also joined the team. The agency also hired a security officer, a guy in a suit who soon began to make our work harder with unnecessary procedures. For instance, we had to lock up our Oracle manuals in a secure location after work and bring the keys to the porter’s lodge. But our manuals were public information like Windows manuals. Today, you can find this information on the Internet.

At the same time, the system that processed traffic fines had a superuser named after the system itself, with a password equal to the system’s name. Several other systems had the same issue, so the superuser and its password were the system’s name. I notified the security officer, but, being a true bureaucrat, he had more important things to do, such as attending meetings, inventing procedures, and preparing management reports. He added the issue to his list. But an issue like that called for immediate action. And so, I contacted a few senior programmers, and together we fixed that problem.

There were other issues with access rights as well. It was a complete mess. As they would say in the course Professional Skills, ‘There was room for improvement.’ If a new employee came in, the service desk made a ticket stating, ‘Create user account X as a copy of account Y,’ and sent it from one department to another. Usually, it took two weeks for the ticket to pass through all our departments, and system administrators made errors. Hence, account X was rarely exactly like account Y. If people switched departments or left, the defunct access rights usually weren’t deleted. Perhaps the audit department had figured this out, as our management soon initiated a project role-based access rights (RBAC).

RBAC works like so. You have a role in a department. In ordinary language, it is your job. For your job, you need access to an array of systems. Your job description determines which rights you need, for instance, reading specific data or changing it. As a rule, employees should not receive more access rights than required to perform their tasks. RBAC is about the rights an employee in a specific job role needs. Business consultants came in and defined job roles and access requirements. A programmer then built an administrative database. However, the database didn’t connect to our systems, so there was no guarantee that the access rights in our systems matched the administration. And if you know how things fare in practice, you know that the administration would soon become stale and pointless. People are lazy, make errors, and forget things. That would change once the administration and our systems connected. If the administration was wrong, people couldn’t do their jobs properly, so it had to be accurate.

In 2004, I secretly began building an account administration system named DBB using Designer/2000, leaving the bureaucrats out of the loop because they would probably stand in the way and make it harder for me. Only my manager and a few colleagues knew about it. DBB automated granting and revoking access rights in our systems the RBAC way. It took me nine months as I also had to do my regular work as a database administrator. But when I was ready to implement DBB on the production databases, bureaucrats became aware of what was happening and tried to block it. In early 2005, I introduced it sneakily with the help of the people from the service desk who wanted to use it. They installed the DBB client programmes on their personal computers. And I was a database administrator, so I could install anything I wanted on any database.

The outcome was above anyone’s expectations, including mine. The service desk created the accounts, so the tickets didn’t have to pass through all those departments. We could create accounts in one day instead of two weeks. The service desk could reset passwords on the spot instead of relaying the request to a department, reducing the time to reset passwords from hours to seconds. And the access rights accurately reflected job roles. So, once DBB was operational, the opposition crumbled, and DBB became a regular application, even though not an official one, which was an essential distinction for bureaucrats. And so, we had RBAC fully implemented.

The logo of DBB came from a drawing made by Ingrid. She had made it for another purpose. It features jokers grinning at a set of file folders. To me, these folders symbolised bureaucracy. DBB joked with the bureaucrats as they considered it a rogue system. Supposedly, I was one of those jokers, so I made one of them my avatar on the Internet. DBB was my love child, just like Fokker once was Jürgen Schrempp’s. I ensured DBB could survive if I left my employer by producing design documents and manuals. I also built DBB according to accepted Designer/2000 practices. We employed Designer/2000 programmers so that they could have maintained DBB. However, I did not follow the proper procedures when building and implementing it, so it never became official. If something went wrong, it was not a mere incident, as would be the case with an official system, but a reason to replace DBB. That is bureaucratic reasoning at its finest. Something went wrong once, which allowed a high-ranking bureaucrat to block further development of DBB.

Our management has started two projects to replace DBB. In 2006, the first effort stalled because they had underestimated the complexity of the matter. They might have thought, ‘If one guy can do it, how difficult can it be?’ In 2016, a new project team realised it was pointless to replace DBB as it was doing fine. Replacing it was costly. The newer Java systems ran on Postgres databases and used web access, so they did not use DBB. Our management planned to decommission the old Designer/2000 systems so DBB could retire by then. By 2024, DBB had retired after nearly twenty years of service.

Bureaucrats have a unique way of doing things. Sometimes, we had serious incidents. While others began filling in a ticket in the incident administration and discussing who should do what, I first went after the issue. And sometimes, I had fixed it before others had finished filling in their forms. Our most critical system went down the most often. The solution was simple, but the operators hesitated and awaited a management decision. I said, ‘Just do it!’ And then they did. If it went wrong, they could blame me. I didn’t have the rank to decide for them, so I would have received a grilling if it went wrong. But time was of the essence. It was an Oracle RAC cluster.

Oracle RAC on VAX VMS was not a great idea, and it regularly caused malfunctions so users couldn’t access the system. RAC is a cluster of machines accessing the same database. The idea behind RAC was that if one of those machines crashed, the others remained operational, and the database remained accessible. In reality, the machines often went down in unison because of communication errors caused by the RAC software. And because the whole point of Oracle RAC was to have less downtime, you could do better without it. When they crashed, we could minimise downtime by rebooting these machines. And the system was critical. It had to be up always. That was why it was our only RAC system. Otherwise, the police might not identify criminals. It was a database with records of criminals dubbed Verwijs Index Personen (Reference Index Persons), acronym VIP, so the Very Important Persons for the Department of Justice.

Bureaucrats seem to value rules more than outcomes, making me wonder what they were thinking. It could be, ‘If I mess things up, no one can blame me if I stick to the rulebook. But if I do the right thing but do not follow procedure and something goes wrong, my job is on the line.’ If something goes wrong, the government hires consultants to investigate the issue and propose changes to the procedures to prevent it from happening again. Consultants thus write piles of reports and make a lot of money on government contracts. Sadly, the next time, the situation may be different, and then it goes wrong again. Over time, the proliferating rules become unwieldy. You might think it is better to do away with procedures, but for governments, that is not a good idea. The role of government is to provide and implement rules. Just imagine government employees doing as they please. Still, there seemed room for improvement. We could do with fewer rules, give people more responsibilities and accept that things can go wrong sometimes. Government officials should be able to think for themselves and make the best out of a situation within the rules. Organisational politics was a fuss, so I tried to stay out of it and focus on my job.

DBB not only joked with the bureaucrats. The joke was also on me and in a most peculiar fashion. In June 2010, I received a highly unusual request from a system administrator to drop a user account manually. That hadn’t happened for several years. DBB usually took care of that, but DBB failed to drop this particular account for some unknown reason. The username was ELVELVEN. If you read that aloud, you say eleven elevens in Dutch, referencing the 11:11 time-prompt phenomenon. Usernames consisted of the first one or two characters of the employee’s first name followed by the employee’s last name. In this case, the user’s last name was Velven. I don’t remember the first name, but it wasn’t Elvis. To me, 11:11 signals a combination of two related unlikely events. And indeed, the joke had a part two, and it was even more peculiar.

In 2014, I tested an improvement to DBB. My test signalled that an illegal account had sneaked into our systems. The username was AD, the first character of the first name followed by the last name of A*. Had she been employed with us, this would have been her username. Her name isn’t common, so this was unnerving, even more so because it was the only username that popped up. It couldn’t be her, or could it? It turned out that a guy with the same last name as hers had worked for us. His first name began with an A as well. And the account wasn’t illegal. I had mixed data from two different dates in the test, which made it appear that this account had sneaked in illegally. But imagine the odds of only this account popping up on that list.

After I had completed DBB in 2005, my manager wanted to give me a promotion, and he only wanted to give it to me. My colleague was a tech genius, so I said he was better than me. My manager then responded with the possibly prophetic words, ‘You have a vision and make it happen despite all the opposition. That is far more important.’ He never put his promise into writing, even though I asked him to several times. Just before he left, I pressed him again to put his promise into writing. As the promotion had not yet come through, he wrote I could get a minor wage increase, and then he filed it for processing at the human resources department. A few weeks later, they summoned me to the human resources department. A bureaucrat had come up with a technicality. I couldn’t even keep the minor wage increase. That was a breach of contract, plain and simple, but to bureaucrats, only rules and procedures count. My previous manager had already left, so they blamed it on him, and his temporary replacement didn’t care as he was also on his way out. As I had put a lot of effort into having it in writing, and my manager had already fobbed me with a minor wage increase, I walked out of the meeting.

When I arrived home, my wife told me that a freelance agency had offered me a job. It was the first offer of this kind since I started working for my employer. And so, I made a rash decision and resigned. In hindsight, it was a stunning coincidence that the freelance agency called me on this particular day. It didn’t take long before I started to have second thoughts. Out of the blue, a strong feeling emerged that it was a wrong decision. I can rationalise it by saying there weren’t many jobs for database administrators near home. And the issues with my son didn’t allow me to work far away from home while my physical condition didn’t allow for long travels. That may all be true, but these considerations were not the real reason. The feeling became so strong that I had no other choice but to reverse course and try to undo my resignation. There was a new manager, and he accepted my change of mind. He pledged to do his best to restore my confidence in my employer. Due to a bureaucratic error, I missed the promotion again a year later. After some years of bureaucratic wrangling, the promotion finally came through.

Latest revision: 4 January 2025

What Is the Point of Politics?

6 Dec 202220 Oct 2025 nivtricLeave a comment

‘Politics is not worth a lightning bolt to me. Throw it to the sharks,’ sang the Dutch band Normaal in the 1980s. Many people feel disillusioned with the government and politicians. Is there something wrong with politics? Is it the system? Are our expectations too high? Do politicians interfere with matters that should require expert knowledge? Do we not elect the right people? Is the political system not democratic enough? There are no simple answers, but some countries do better than others. Francis Fukuyama wrote two books about political order. Good government is an uphill struggle that never stops.

And democracy often has frustrated the establishment of good government. So, there is reason to think, ‘What is the point of politics?’ Over the centuries, there might have been some progress in political institutions, which are customs, laws, government organisations, and other arrangements. Human nature does not change, so politicians have not evolved to a higher standard. People in the past devised institutions to provide stability and make governments work better. In recent decades, globalisation has made several institutions dysfunctional, most notably, the nation-state.

The basics

So, what is the point of politics? We organise ourselves economically and politically with the use of ideas. Among those ideas are money, states, and religions or ideologies. That made us successful as a species. We have languages to describe situations and the things we can do. And we discuss other people and what they are doing and thinking. That gives us information about other people, for instance, who can do a particular job best and who are reliable and who are not. We use that information to cooperate.¹

Politics deals with questions like: what should we do as a group, what must our rules be, and who shall lead us? What we are going to do, is decided by ideas like sowing crops in the spring, doing a rain dance in the summer to please the rain fairy, and harvesting in the autumn. And we may have a priest who leads the rain dance. We do the rain dance we believe in the rain fairy. If rain does not come, we might try to please the fairy by electing another priest. But beliefs can be wrong.

This short tale already tells a lot about politics. There is a belief system. There are rules. And there is authority. Villagers believe the performance of the priest influences the rainfall. Political leaders influence what happens, but in many cases, they must deal with circumstances over which they have little control. Leaders might revert to public display, like ordering more elaborate rain dances to show us they are working on the problem. Things can go wrong because of our beliefs.

The big man

We are social animals, and politics is in our nature. We discuss plans, who should do what, which rules we must follow, and who should lead. Traditional societies also have politicians. For example, the big man leads a family group in Papua New Guinea. He earns his status by gaining the community’s trust, usually by solving conflicts and distributing resources to the members of his tribe. The big man can lose his position, and someone else can take his place.²

The big man is a politician, like the alpha male of a chimpanzee band. Much of politics comes down to solving conflicts in the group and distributing resources and favours. To become the leader, the big man forges a coalition of followers. His followers benefit from his leadership. He can also take actions that benefit the entire community and gain widespread respect. Not much has changed since then. Politicians look after the interests of their followers and can work in the public interest.

The role of institutions

Politicians are like big men in Papua New Guinea or priests of the rain fairy. And they can disappoint us by giving us fewer favours than we expected or not bringing rain. In democracies, we elect our leaders, so why do we not select better ones? Perhaps the problem is not politicians but how we conduct politics and organise societies. The programmatic political parties of Western Europe may have been an apex in the development of politics. They promoted general policies in the interest of their constituency or the public interest. But these parties have lost their lustre.

Today’s world differs from the world where they emerged and flourished. If you were born in a socialist or Roman Catholic family in the Netherlands in 1900, you remained a socialist or a Roman Catholic for the rest of your life. Dutch society was stable, and politicians did not need to compete for attention. The ideologies and religions of these parties have not passed the test of time. They have no answers to the questions of today. Many voters think traditional parties do not represent interests. In the absence of new ideas, politics becomes about identities and personalities.

Institutions can raise politics beyond the level of individuals and their interests, emotions and weaknesses. Traditional societies already have them. The rule of electing a new priest when rain fails to come is an institution. It tells us what we should do when rain doesn’t come. Otherwise, villagers might disagree and start a bloody conflict. The harvest is of the utmost importance. If you do not have faith in the measures taken, you feel obliged to protect yourself and your family from the stupidity of others. Institutions like rain dances can keep the peace but do not guarantee good outcomes.

Political development

The first humans were hunter-gatherers who lived in small bands. They had no property. In times of conflict, they often relocated. Later on, bands coalesced into tribes. Tribes could arrange more men for warfare. A reason to do so was the Agricultural Revolution, causing a switch to crop planting and cattle herding. Crops and livestock that needed defence from thievery and pillaging.

People living in tribes could have a lot of freedom. Tribes were loosely connected, and tribal leaders had limited authority. They might settle disputes, but only if parties agreed on them being the referee. Tribal leaders usually did not give orders. Another political development was the lord with his armed vassals. In Europe, this was called feudalism. Similar arrangements existed elsewhere in the form of warlords and gangs.

The requirements of warfare promoted the development of states. There was intense competition between states in China during the warring states era. Chinese states had armies of up to 500,000 men. They rationalised their organisation and tax systems. As a result, the first modern states appeared in China, and China remained the most advanced state for nearly 2,000 years.

States have the authority to order people. After humans switched to crop planting and cattle herding, there was more food, and more people could live in the same area. And more people could create more sizeable production surpluses to maintain states. States provided more security than tribes as they had police and standing armies, so the inhabitants could benefit from the defence and political stability that states could provide.

The modern state

Modern states have a rationally organised administration with merit-based recruitment and promotion. That happened in China first. Chinese emperors did not have to pass an exam. They inherited the title or came out on top during a power struggle. Emperors had unchecked powers, and there was no guarantee that only good emperors made it to the throne.2 Institutions can protect the country from poor rulers. This problem does not go away if we elect our leaders. That is why democratic states also have institutions, most notably, the separation of powers.

The separation of powers aims to split the state into three independent branches, which are the administration (the executive), the parliaments (the legislative) and the courts (the judiciary). Each has its responsibilities, and the branches should not interfere with each other’s tasks. Parliaments make the laws, the administration executes them, and the courts verify whether they are applied correctly. Ideally, the administration has no power over the parliaments and the courts. For instance, the administration should not nominate or appoint candidates for the parliaments and the courts, and the courts should stay out of political affairs, which is the domain of parliaments.

As political leaders change and can raise controversy, many nations have a ceremonial head of state to provide a sense of stability and continuity in the form of a person. Some countries hold on to their royal families, while others have presidents to perform that role. Usually, ceremonial presidents are highly respected individuals who do not interfere with political affairs. Royals can also provide a stable sense of nationhood, but kingship is a birthright. Kings do not need to have particular qualities, so they may lose the respect of their nation, while a ceremonial president has earned the nation’s respect and, therefore, is less likely to lose it.

Our predicament

Improvements in democratic political systems are possible, but our current predicament is not so much the result of a lack of democracy. Our belief systems are at stake, for instance, nationalism, socialism and liberalism, but also cultures, religions and traditions. And we have made money the prime mover of our decisions. Wealth inequality has increased in recent decades, creating a self-reinforcing trend in which an oligarchy has all the wealth and power. Identity conflicts and pride also block progress.

You can analyse the economy from a socialist or a capitalist perspective. The results are very different, and neither is the analysis entirely wrong or right. The proponents of ideologies and religions tend to have an explanation for everything. Within the confines of their models, their arguments make sense. If you believe in the rain fairy, it makes sense to think she is angry when rainfall does not come. Many of our belief systems are models of reality with merits and drawbacks, and we should treat them like so.

Our political institutions are the result of ideas from the past. They still have merits but grow increasingly problematic. Clinging to obsolete thoughts is like doing rain dances to prevent harvest failures when the cause is climate change. If existing ideas stop working, people become frustrated and lose faith. If crops continue to fail, some villagers may realise that electing a new priest does not solve the problem. They may worship the weather spirit instead and start a violent conflict with followers of the rain fairy.

The issues we now face come primarily from failing ideas and institutions rather than politicians. Existing religions and ideologies have no answers to the issues of today as many are global collective action problems, while centralised complex systems are ineffective in dealing with them. If the collapse is at hand, we may need to find common ground about what we should do and delegate practical decision-making about how to do it to the local level when possible.

Featured image: House Of Commons in the United Kingdom. Parliament.uk. [link]

1. Sapiens: A Brief History Of Humankind. Yuval Noah Harari (2014). Harvil Secker.
2. The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. Francis Fukuyama (2011).

Extreme living

21 Nov 202229 Nov 2025 nivtricLeave a comment

Overdoing things

In 1994, Princess, a friend from the United States, visited me in Groningen, where I lived at the time. Before we went out to the supermarket in the local mall, I took a shopping bag with me. Princess remarked on the shopping bag as if it were something peculiar. You could get a new one at the supermarket, she said. I answered that it was wasteful to fetch a new bag from the shop. She then called me an environmental extremist. I had no car and travelled by train, so that might have made her think this. I already believed that Americans are wasteful consumers, so her remark confirmed my prejudice. Taking a shopping bag with you is a minor inconvenience, but where does it stop? In other words, what will life be like after the apocalypse?

Perhaps Princess was right. Most of my clothes are over twenty years old. Some come from a thrift shop. There are holes in my underwear. My excuse is that no one sees my underwear. Sometimes I take a bath when there is plenty of solar and wind energy. I have an electric heater to heat the water. When the sun doesn’t shine, I sometimes warm up a litre of water and take a washcloth to wash myself. Compared to taking a shower, it saves over 95% in energy and water. Now and then, I succumb to temptation and take a shower or a bath. And I can’t help but eat scraps others leave behind, or when my son still lived with us, use paper towels he had discarded after hardly using them.

Waste and spillage unnerve me. I had a poorly insulated old home. It caused distress, making me anxiously oversee my natural gas consumption. I could easily pay the bill, so it wasn’t that. Insulating my house and only heating the living room resolved my emotional issues. As a side benefit, I reduced my energy bill by 70%. Still, I can’t stop brooding over new ways to lower my energy consumption even further. I do office work and can work at 17 degrees Celsius with warm clothes and gloves. My mother once said that I overdo things. Buying second-hand is what poor people do. My parents were raised in poverty and had worked hard, so they could buy new things and enjoy luxuries.

I don’t want to upset others, so I try to act inconspicuously. Everyone should live a simple life, but for a long time, my argument was, ‘Who am I to tell others what to do?’ Later, the excuse became, ‘Who is going to believe me?’ It is not always possible to guess what disturbs others. Or I might forget. Once, I wore worn-out clothes to a family party. My father was not amused. That was an oversight. My father thinks it is disrespectful to the hosts. They don’t take offence, and I don’t take offence at my family’s excessive consumption. That has been their upbringing. They must know they turn our planet into a wasteland. But everyone else lives the good life, so what is the point?

What is normal?

Who is an extremist depends on what we consider normal. Today, we think it is normal to live at the expense of poor people and future generations. It is normal to aspire to a luxury yacht and extravagant living. You may not be able to afford it, but you can dream of it. That is the American Dream. My life is rather ordinary, albeit with a few luxuries. I don’t engage in extreme measures like turning off the heating or getting rid of my car. I might have done so if I had lived alone, but my wife doesn’t want it. It is not enough, but there is no point in scrapping comfort if you are the only one doing it. What is the point of living without comfort if others go on driving SUVs and taking holidays by aeroplane?

The only way to do it is to do it together. Wasteful lifestyles can’t remain the norm much longer, so if we don’t change, disaster is likely. We can manage. My great-grandparents hardly left the village they lived in. They had no car, no television, and probably had never been to Germany. That seems like extreme living now. But it is not as hard as it appears. The 80/20 rule states that, for many outcomes, roughly 80% of the consequences come from 20% of the causes. It means that for those who aren’t poor, an 80% reduction in consumption would reduce their well-being by 20%.

The Netherlands has a mild climate. Winters have become significantly milder in recent decades, so there is hardly any frost. Cuts in energy use will cause discomfort but little suffering. In many other locations, the situation is quite different. I once read a story of a guy in rural Ohio who had lived off the grid for one winter and shared his experience on a message board. He woke up to a harsh reality. Things freeze and break down. You can easily get injured and incapacitated. He will not do it again. And he couldn’t do without a car. More experienced people gave him tips. One commenter suggested that he should move to a warmer location. Alaska has its version of the 15-minute city, Whittier, where all 200 residents live in one building, complete with necessities like a shop and a church.

Time is money or convenience

In 2002, when I was unemployed for a few months, I tried my hand at an allotment garden. It was a lot of work. It got me a few vegetables I could buy cheaply at the supermarket. Once I had a job again, I gave it up. Not so long ago, most people grew their food because they were poor. They had no other job, so they had the time. There were no agricultural machines, so it was manual labour. Today, home-grown food is uneconomical. Working 1 hour at the office might buy the food that takes 40 hours of work if you grow it yourself. It is an economic calculation. If I could earn more by producing food than working at the office, I would quit my job and grow food. That is why few people grow their own food.

You can save money by cooking your own meals instead of eating out or ordering takeout. Alternatively, you could work more, and if you make more money than you save by cooking, eating out is economically optimal. Usually, you don’t make these calculations. I never go to the canteen at work. I spread my bread before going to work instead. Many people take the convenience to save time, often because they have no time due to their work commitments. They say that time is money. So, time equates to money or convenience. People who work in restaurants have jobs that wouldn’t exist if we cooked our own food. Many of these jobs are bullshit jobs.

The consumerist economy is about squandering resources and energy to make money. Advertisements tell us how easy a product is and how much time or trouble it saves us. They don’t tell us how many hours we work for it. Eating out is convenient, but you have to work longer hours to pay for it. You could work less when you cook your meals yourself. If you forego ease, you can have more time. In the past, people had time to grow their food or mend their clothes. That is a lot of work, but food and clothes were more expensive, or incomes were lower. Buying new clothes meant more work than mending the old ones, because they had to work more hours to afford them. It was economically efficient to mend clothes and grow food because they were poor.

Wealth and poverty

My closet still features clothes from forty years ago. My mother bought them when I was a teenager. Most clothes don’t last that long. The fashion industry is the second-largest polluter. It generates, among others, mountains of waste, including landfills of unsold clothes, 20% of the world’s water pollution, and 10% of global carbon emissions. The economy is about selling more stuff to generate profits. The latest trend is fast fashion, so clothes that fall apart after you have worn them a few times. Your clothes won’t last a season, and new ones are cheap, so you can always stay fashionable.

The world’s largest waste producer, China, is making new clothes affordable for everyone, including the poorest. New clothes from China have become cheaper than second-hand from Europe. Africans can now buy new clothes. And so, Africa is now finally becoming economically developed, thus consumerist and wasteful like the rest of the world. Today, many Africans have newer clothes than I have.

Who is rich and who is poor? To me, wealth is how long you can survive on your capital. So, if your expenses halve, and your capital remains the same, you are twice as rich. The wealth of humanity is how long we can sustain our lifestyles. At present, human consumption levels are unsustainable because they exceed the planet’s capacity. If we could consider this planet ours, which we can’t, we are eating up our capital. We are poor but could be rich and live off the interest of our capital if we reduce our consumption to sustainable levels. And if you have a capitalist spirit like me, and think ahead, you are willing to save and invest in the future.

Living without a car

Many car owners work one day per week to pay for their car. Using public transport may take longer, but without a car, you can skip one working day each week or retire earlier. And you can think further. Why should you make that trip? In the past, people hardly ever left their village. If your aunt celebrated her birthday and lived thirty kilometres away, you didn’t go. And no one was offended. You didn’t go anywhere. There were festivals in your village that you could attend. Once or twice a year, there was some entertainment. For the rest of the time, you had to entertain yourself or bore yourself. That is extreme living.

For many years, I didn’t have a car, despite having a job that required one. I lived in a remote city. My job was there, or at least 200 kilometres from home, so I had to stay in a hotel. In that case, I took a train to a station nearby and parked my bicycle there. In either case, I went to my work by bike, either from my home or from the hotel. Using public transport requires planning, extra time, and sometimes considerable sacrifice. I remember taking a thirty-minute walk through the snow to reach an office outside the city centre, as buses only went there during rush hour. And then there was all that waiting at train stations. It saved me money, allowing me to buy a house. After all, time is money.

After I met my wife, we could borrow her mother’s car if we needed one, or we rented one. When her mother’s car fell apart in 2003, I bought my own, a second-hand 1998 Opel Astra, which has now survived over 320,000 kilometres. But I still go to work by public transport. And I use public transport for trips, if it is not too much trouble. Later, I began thinking about ways to reduce energy consumption. One way was combining trips. So, if I visited my sister, I also visited my father. That saved 200 kilometres of driving. We went to the forest nearly weekly, a 60-kilometre round trip to see some trees. There are parks near home. And so, we walk in these parks instead.

Turning down the heating

My grandparents had no central heating. It was cold inside their home, and it could even freeze. They warmed themselves at the stove in the living room, the only warm place. Central heating is a luxury we can do without. In 2022, Vlad the Empire Builder decided to launch a special military operation in Ukraine, leading to the termination of cheap Russian gas supplies to Europe. Natural gas prices skyrocketed for a while. To save energy, many people resorted to extreme measures, such as turning down the heating or only heating the living room. Some even turned off the heating entirely and put on a warm vest or a coat. You may not want to go that far, but heating only the living room makes sense.

Newspapers in the Netherlands featured a series about people who cut their energy use. Take, for example, Adri from Yerseke and his wife, who heat the living room of their 1906 home with a modern AC unit. They have insulated the walls, installed high-efficiency windows, and installed solar panels on the property. They consume 2,400 kWh of electricity and generate 3,000 kWh per year. Their natural gas use is nearly zero, as they shower only occasionally and wash themselves with a washcloth. Switching from central heating to an AC in the living room is probably what generates the most savings.

In our living room, the winter temperature is 19°C. I also made some changes in recent years, such as insulating poorly isolated rooms. An AC is now the primary source of heating. Only if the AC can’t maintain the temperature does the central heating come into play. As a result, the remainder of the house remains barely heated, which is where most of the cost savings come from. I work in a small room in the attic with an electric heater. When working there in the winter, I may wear warm clothes and gloves, and put an electric pillow on my lap. When you choose to do these things, it feels much better than when you must because you can’t afford the energy bill. But it is how we should live.

Growing your own food or local farming

Growing food is a lot of work. I had an allotment garden for one season. Sneek had clay soil, which is sturdy, thus not easy to till. The cost savings were negligible, probably less than the plot’s rent. Vegetables and potatoes in the supermarket are affordable, so the allotment garden wasn’t worth the hassle. I suspect we will live simpler lives in the future, yet I don’t foresee 90% of the population working in agriculture, as was the case in the Middle Ages. In wealthy countries, that number might rise, but not above 10% I suspect.

We will still have much more energy than we had for most of history. We will discontinue unnecessary economic activities and allocate a greater share of our resources to agriculture. And so, agriculture will probably remain largely mechanised and carried out by professional farmers. Today, farmers sell their produce to national and even global markets. European wine ends up in the United States, and California wine ends up in Europe. That is resource inefficient.

High energy prices may revive diversified farming for local and regional markets, as well as growing crops in their respective seasons. That was also the case in the past. Today, we have supermarkets. Selling local products may require a separate distribution channel, such as a person collecting produce from farmers and selling it to local customers. Several foods require centralised industrial processing for safety reasons, but a wide range of foodstuffs is suitable for local production and consumption.

Not throwing away

Recycling costs energy and doesn’t fully recover all the waste. So, what about not throwing things away in the first place? You can recycle glass by dumping it in a glass container, but turning it into new glass costs energy. And there is so much packaging. You go to a shop, buy a bottle, and throw away the old one when it is empty. That is normal. An outlandish suggestion is to have a tank in the supermarket where we can refill our reusable bottles. And we could bring bags with us for bread and fruit.

There are some considerations. It might not be a good idea for perishable foodstuffs. It is also advisable not to mix skin care products with detergents. It is best to use separate bottles designed for each substance to prevent accidental mixing. The hardest part is that we have to bring these bottles and bags to the shop. We have to plan and take the bottles and bags with us. That is an inconvenience that modern consumers might consider outrageous.

Finally, there are a few extreme ideas that might get you out of your comfort zone. You can save energy and water by showering or bathing less frequently and using a washcloth instead of a shower or a bath. You warm a bit of water, add some soap, and there you are. Some people change clothes daily. Once or twice a week can be enough in many cases. You can also switch to less frequent underwear changes, such as every other day instead of daily. Washing your clothes less frequently saves energy and extends their lifespan.

Latest revision: 29 November 2025

1. Welcome To Whittier, Alaska, A Community Under One Roof. NPR (2015).

Book: The Virtual Universe

10 Nov 20227 Sep 2025 nivtric1 Comment

Several religions claim that a god or gods have created this universe. The simulation hypothesis explains how this might have happened. We could all live inside a computer simulation run by an advanced post-human civilisation. But can we establish that this is indeed the case?

The evidence suggests that we live inside a simulation. It even allows us to infer the purpose of our existence. This book does not promote a specific religion. It follows science, but science has its limits. It can’t tell whether the world we live in is real.

Still, the sciences can support the argument that this world is a simulation, as they have established the natural laws that guide reality. If breaches of these laws occur, such as paranormal incidents with credible witnesses, we have evidence indicating that this world is not real.

We have just invented virtual reality. We can utilise virtual reality for both research and entertainment purposes. If the technology to create virtual worlds becomes affordable, most worlds will exist for entertainment, such as games or inventing stories where we can make our dreams come true.

The latter requires control over everything that happens, which is the situation we appear to be in. With our current knowledge, the world makes the most sense as a simulation created by an advanced post-human civilisation to entertain someone we can call God.

In this book, you can find answers to the following questions:

Is there something more than science can explain?
Is there a plan behind all that happens?
What are virtual worlds?
How can we know things and determine whether we live in a virtual world?
How can we explain things science can’t explain?
What are the simulation hypothesis and simulation argument about?
Can we improve the simulation argument to establish whether we are living in a simulation?
Why does our existence not need to be a miracle?
What reasons might post-humans have to create virtual worlds?
Can we infer from the properties of our universe that we live in a simulation?
What can we say about the evidence of spooks?
What is real about UFOs?
Do curses exist?
Do meaningful coincidences indicate that there is a script?
Is there some point to numeric coincidences like 11:11?
What happens after we die?
How can mediums sometimes be uncannily accurate?
Are there strange coincidences in history?
Are there an excessive number of strange coincidences surrounding the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks?
What are the consequences of predetermination, and how does it affect our lives?
Is it possible to establish that we live in a story by using meaningful coincidences as evidence?
So, can we establish beyond a reasonable doubt that we live inside a simulation?
And can we establish the purpose of our existence?