A bit of chilled funk to lighten the mood

I Stumbled upon this song today and am loving it.

It's good music like this that makes me feel that the human race ain't too bad after all.

The youtube comment: "This is what elevator music needs to sound like.." inspires me to want to design an elevator, and indeed a whole building, cool and funky enough to warrant it being played there.

Triple post:The problem with utopia; it still has people...

Perfection seeking Singapore.

After reading Monty Don’s description of Singapore "It is clean, comfortable, law-abiding and a paradigm of the modern, aspirational urban life. But from the moment that we arrived at the station I disliked almost everything about it.” I can relate. Whilst I wouldn't say I 'disliked almost every part of it' I have always felt a strange constrained vibe to Singapore and feel it also applies to my impression of Copenhagen. As much as I enjoyed my stay there, a six month study exchange, I was slightly depressed and disappointed by the city and on a wider sense Danish society. Perhaps not for the same exact reasons, but related none-the-less. The problem I felt with Copenhagen was that despite it being a rather enlightened society with a good social system, public services, a high standard of living and despite most people being quite intelligent and well educated there were still a lot of problems. People were still materialistic, although in a slightly different and more stylish way, people were still greedy, people still got drunk, people were still rude.

It made me realise that you cannot ever overcome all of society’s problems. This is because the problems with society stem from the inherent problems of human nature. It’s not that living in Copenhagen made me give up hope for a utopian society. It’s just that it made me realise how hard it would be to create this, and how far off we are from that today. (written 25/01/11)

Copenhagen Library: rational, smart, cool and stylish, but self-consciously so.

Income gaps (source:Bangkok Post)

After watching ‘The Shock Doctrine’ documentary I began thinking about the widening income gap, power and democracy. For the rich to actually get richer the majority still have to live in at least reasonable conditions. This is because if the majority suffers whilst only the very top live well, even if democracy has failed them, the power of the masses is such that once a tipping point is reached, such has been seen recently in North Africa, the corrupt system will be overthrown. I then did some research into world income gaps and, according to one source at least, found it interesting to see Denmark on top as the country with the lowest gap between richest and poorest. It is not a huge shock after living there and seeing the high level of public services; knowing that these result from the very high level of national income tax. What was surprising, however, was that once again I am presented with proof that Danish society is one of the most developed and enlightened in the world, and I don’t like it. As stated above the problems in Denmark might be very minor when compared to those faced by most other countries in the world, but this doesn’t make the Danish people themselves seem any nicer, happier or less flawed than anyone else.

Copenhagen: where 'fitting in' is part of being cool.

The best way to describe what I see as the problem with Danish culture is that it is very self-conscious. Of course it makes absolute sense that if you have all your basic needs met, and you are happy and intelligent you will put more effort into making sure that your style and your look is more precisely how you would like it to be, but the problem is that when it reaches the levels seen in Denmark, and Sweden and indeed most of Northern Europe, it becomes quite an obsession. A slightly arrogant and narcissistic obsession one might argue. The problem made evident by the self-conscious nature of Danish culture is that humans are incapable of being truly content. We are always wanting to be better, wanting others to be better for us and always looking for more. (written 14/3/11)

Perhaps this is simply my problem. Lisa:"Look I made a graph; I make a lot of graphs."

We are an inherently ambitious species and it is this ambition that has got us to where we are today. There is a downside to this ambition, however, and this is that we are a particularly ungrateful species, we are rarely satisfied with what we have and are almost always greedy for more. (written 25/01/2011)

We enslave ourselves for freedom

Going home early on Saturday night so that I can get up early to work the next day I contemplate the situation.

The majority of my spending would probably relate to going out and enjoying myself. If I didn’t go out then I wouldn’t need to go to work. 

So we bind ourselves to our employment for money.

And how do we spend our money? On enjoying ourselves and expressing our freedom.

The only way to have freedom in a capitalist society is to enslave yourself to your employer.

Herein lies the irony. We enslave ourselves for freedom.

A great image by Pawla Kuczynskiego