Tag: Jorrit Jorik

Exhaling on YouTube

June 18, 2020 / Rowan Rodrik

I’ve created a YouTube channel separate from my private account and branded it “BigSmoke”. The channel’s purpose is to breathe some fresh air into some online discussions that I follow(ed). Actually, the content is the sort of content that I used to want to put more of on BigSmoke, but which I now found to be better suited for long-form discussions than for laying down my views from some ivory tower.

The first three puffs of fresh air feature my brother Jorrit:

In the first puff, recorded shortly after he (and me too for the nth time) quit caffeine. The cue for me to want to do that podcast (and stop putting off this creative endeavor indefinitely) was when he told me that quitting caffeine took a heavier toll on his body and mind than did quitting smoking and drinking at the same time a few months earlier. I though that that was a great story to put into perspective that yes, caffeine really is a serious, addictive drug that can interfere not just with your dreams but actually with your dreaming!

Production-wise, the worst part of this first podcast is that my face is tiny, because I used Google Meet and neglected to install a browser extension to undo its limited layout support or to even just click my own face when I was talking.
The 2nd puff of fresh air centered around meaning. Without the caffeine in my system, I was having more trouble than usual to find the meaning in my “mostly for money” job that’s really doing nothing to make the world a better, more beautiful place. Also, my self-discipline had declined to a long-time, leaving too little time and energy around work-work for more creative meaningful endeavors (such as doing podcasts).

There was a bit of a production problem with my 2nd puff of fresh air. The one published is a re-iteration of the same discussion we had some days before that but for which I recorded an empty audio stream of my docking station’s unconnected microphone input instead of the audio stream of the laptop port in which my microphone was actually plugged in. At least I did find Jitsi, which allowed easier side-to-side video frames.
In the 3rd puff of fresh air, we zoom in on some topics that we brushed past in the 2nd without really touching. I talk about my pain and shame of being mostly just another cooperating cog in the machine that is wreaking planetary-scale havoc and that is grinding ecosystems all over the world out of existence. Jorrit’s focus is on the harm that’s done to human happiness by our culture (and also the “away with us” culture of which I’m sometimes a part). We try to make our visions on self-discipline collide, but we end up finding more agreement than we expect. Most of our disagreement turns out to be superficially bound to societal structures which we both would rather see transformed than preserved in their current sickly form.

We switched back to Google Meet for this 3rd recorded conversation, because the free Jitsi server we used was performing shakily that day.

A domain for the Omega Research Foundation

March 22, 2007 / Rowan Rodrik

Popko, my dad, has founded the Omega Research Foundation in 1984 (when I was two years old). The Foundation was to serve as a a vehicle for his research into cyclical changes within ecological and social systems.

Last week, after 23 years of hibernation, the foundation has been geared up again to publish what Popko had already been wanting to publish these twenty plus years ago. So, what happened in between? For the last 15 years, Sicirec happened. Actually, Sicirec is still happening, but, starting last month, I don’t need to spend the majority of my waking hours on it anymore. That’s why I registered the domain omega-research.org and installed a wiki and a weblog under it.

Jorrit is also in on this project. We’re doing this together, the three of us, hoping to involve others from within and around our circle.

Jorrit Jorik van der Molen

August 13, 2006 / Rowan Rodrik

Jorrit is a boy, the only other boy among my five siblings. He is the oldest son of our parents, and big brother to everyone except Arwen. Of the six of us, he’s easily the most intelligent.

Dreams

The greatest of all dreamers, Jorrit’s great dream is that all other people will realize theirs.

Once, alone à la Boucoule in France, I saw a rainbow nearby. It ended in the mountainside only meters away, but the meters multiplied as I came closer…

Jorrit has never physically chased a rainbow. Yet, he has had to take truckloads of muck from people (such as me (and me (and me))) because of his dreams. They call him a dreamer, which he acknowledges: Yes, I am a dreamer!

Simple start

Jorrit’s childhood dreams started as simple as many people’s dreams: after high-school, he wanted to travel, preferrably by motorcycle. Seeing different places and people, while roaming free was all I think he wanted. Such dreams, although considered by some to be frivolous, are still socially acceptable enough (as long as you grow out of it with time, of course).

Romantic love rules and complicates

Towards the end of high-school, some things happened: his deep dissatisfaction shifted from himself towards society and school. At seventeen he went on a spiritual retraite together with Popko, our father. There he met some changes of insight and also his first love. Eventually, he settled at his love Tineke’s place to live happily together.

There was one problem with his newly found happyness. Avatar, and later Landmark had greatly boosted his urge to change the world. He had left these courses with a feeling that with good-enough planning and persistence the world could be once again turned into a paradise. However, Tineke didn’t much like his more disruptive and revolutionary side. She preferred things to be relatively stable and secure. In the end, Jorrit required quite a bit of Cannabis to make his increasingly boring life and increasingly dull dead-end jobs more bearable.

Pain

But, drug usage and dead-endness notwithstanding, life was good with his lovely Lady. That is, untill she wanted to move on with an older man. To Jorrit, his and Tineke’s ±25 years of difference in age seemed less of a problem, but he obligued.

Then, back to our Dad Popko’s place, where he spend a year or two feeling quite depressed. During that time, he worked for Popko. Eventually, he and Popko clashed more often due to a lack of mutual respect and Jorrit moved to a place of his own in the city of Groningen.

Hope…

During that hopeful time

For a while, life seemed much greather there. He had his own little garden, could get up whenever he damn well pleased and could smoke all the weed he wanted without anyone commenting on these or other bad habits. This would be the environment from which he could start to organize things in order to change the world around him.

But, plans remained plans. No freedom was aquired and no freedom was spread. Society stayed as stubournly stupid as it has always been (for the last ten thousand years, that is).

Lies and truths

Often, I’ve told him: Open your eyes! Look around you! There are plenty of happy people! Sometimes, he vaguely acknowledged this, but only to stop me from acting smug, because the truth is simply too obvious: most people are not even satisfied with their lifes, let alone happy; the world population at large is doing misarable. We’re so dysfunctional that we can’t even preserve the very environment that sustains us.

But, few of us like to hear the truth, even if the bearer of truth caries the good news of liberation. To protect their cages, the people have done more than ignoring Jorrit. He has been ridiculed, laughed at and called a Satan.

Travel, after all

Luckily, in October 2005, Jorrit managed to escape the prison-like confines of his own life. He, his girlfriend and me left for France on our bicycles. I left them there a month later, and, as of August 2006, his prison cell still seems empty.

Contact

Hyves profile
Email him at jorritjorik AT gmail DOT com
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