we ARE systems

Lecture @ Investor Day - Katapult Future Fest 2024

I stand here, as a human being. Not as a business owner, an architect, writer or a researcher. But as a human. And with the concept of being human, the concept of living, comes the familiar existential question - why do we keep going? I say it’s a familiar question, in fact it hits me every time I break free from the ongoing machine that is society. When I take a moment to step out of the rush of everyday life. When a stillness lays a quiet blanket over me and I finally have time to sit with that one and wonderfully awful question. Why do we live? 

What is this for? Why wake up every day if the world is so cruel and painful? Why exist in a society where brutal wars kill thousands of children? Why exist in a space where the rich are so disgustingly rich and where the poor are devastatingly poor? Why exist when millions of people battle heatwaves and floods? It’s easy to question, what does this life require from us? 

Throughout history, humans have wondered just like me about the “whys” and have tried to make sense of it all. Greek philosophers, enlightened thinkers, existentialists, politicians, farmers, tired mothers, cleaners and truck drivers. We have all thought the same, and we’re all kept without answers. And within this lies my belief that the heavy human notion of our uncertain existence is the root cause for so many cruel historic and current events. The pain of living but not knowing what will happen tomorrow can be devastating for anyone. To not know what will materialise the next minute, to have a brain that can’t fully understand what that unknown future means to our existence. It is truly and severely agonising. Many have tried to find peace with this feeling - one could argue we’ve done what we could with the tools that were given to us. And that’s all fine. However, we now sit with an overhanging planetary threat killing both human and other lives. Are we doing enough? Are we understanding the crisis enough? Is the actual crisis rather that we don’t understand ourselves?

I believe the lack of still human pondering, being the root cause for how we behave with, and overuse, Earth. But lately, I’ve also started questioning our human abilities. Or, our actual will to use those abilities. We are extraordinary and creative. Compared to many other living things we have capacities to disrupt systems, imagine new pathways and follow through. We can choose to walk left instead of right. We can build different types of cities, if we want to. We have found cures and medications to life threatening diseases. We have created money. We have set up systems to govern, control and vote. We have made electricity. Started fire. We have designed telephones and computers. We have made the wheel. And high heels. We have created airplanes. Boats. Beds. We have calculated how large parts of the universe function. We have created structure of time. Watches. Maths. We have made Artificial Intelligence. And here comes my wonder, my extensive hypothesis. How can we then be so strikingly incompetent in creating and innovating a more kind society? 

When we now find ourselves in a time where report after report clearly shows that we are not making enough progress, then might it be time to raise awareness and spark dialogues on our trust in technology and hardware as the best or only solution forward? Might it be time to give space to what is often labelled naive, less important or not efficient enough? Might it be time to shed light on emotions? Might it be time to invest in what makes human life meaningful and beautiful? To invest in education? In meaningful moments? Might it be time to invest in love? 

Many have started to connect the dots, and the knowledge of thinking in systems is broadly accepted and an active tool for understanding complexity. But if we just keep talking about systems while thinking that they are something we can hold, something we can engineer and something we can fold according to our beliefs, then we’re still not fully understanding how systems behave. We ARE systems. 

We live them. We manifest them. Systems are emotional, vivid, alive. If we would fully embody the systems we say we need to shift, then our realities would surely feel very different. How can you be part of a system where children are slaughtered? I’m asking this question because you are. We all are. Yet somehow we create both emotional and material boundaries between realities, between systems and between what we want to see, and what we want to feel. 

I suggest we become unusually brave when we talk about serious solutions to human existence. The best solutions may not be found where we are used to be looking for them. Maybe they sit with things that we love? Things we live for. Music is one of those things. I've spent thousands of hours with sheets of classical music created by others, sometimes hundreds of years before my existence. Through their tiny black dots on papers, emotions have travelled through time and space, you might even call it a sort of an early soft internet or an emotional morse code. One composer that has meant more to me than so many others is Nadia Boulanger. She wasn’t only a pianist, but also a great conductor and possibly most famous for having been a wonderful teacher to what some would argue, the core of the 20th century composers. She taught among many others, Philip Glass and Quincy Jones.

So, why am I rambling on about musicians and composers to an audience of investors? The reason is that humanity is on a tragic course towards way more death, destruction and chaos. And even though we might not be able to stop this from happening, we can absolutely do what we can with what we have. Nadia wasn’t just a pianist, I would argue she was a systems engineer changing lives and futures. I’m not a believer of putting numbers onto impacts to prove their importance. But only Nadia, Philip Glass and Quincy Jones together, have 4 000 000 monthly listeners on Spotify. Their music has a massive impact on human life. And if we believe that emotions can shift systems, then those musicians are on to something of such important value that we would be enormously stupid to not invest in similar minds. 

I’m going to leave you with a simple yet brutally honest and beautiful piece of music that Nadia wrote in 1910 when she was 23 years old. The first world war was around the corner and I suppose, just like you and me, she felt worried about the future while still being able to keep glorious music inside of her. 

Most of the time I do not have a reply to why we live, but then sometimes it hits me. I exist, we exist, because life is also insanely beautiful.