With one of my students I always go to a bar. We have the English lesson there. It’s supposed to last 90 minutes, but usually we talk for at least 180 minutes, often more.

There’s a clear pattern in what we talk about. For once I want to keep this is a short article. I’d like to get to the essence.

We start out by talking about the success of Amazon, the automatisation of the labour market, and if AI will lead to mass unemployment and how to deal with that in the future. Who will buy the products robots at companies produce if none of the unemployed can pay for them? You could distribute these products for free, but the rich who are the owners of those productive robots will never agree to that.

Anyway, that’s how it starts, but what’s really behind it is that we are both

Restless

Maybe that’s the tragedy of men. We always want more. When we talk about Amazon the motivation is not purely a love for big efficient structures and strategies. It’s also that we would love to have something that functions just as succesfully as Amazon. What’s behind it is that we both feel there should be more to our lives, that we are underperforming.

We talk about our fathers, our models for life, and how hard it is to break free from a relatively poor background. How hard it is to figure out what to do with your life even, or especially, if everyone seems to agree that your brain works at above average speed.

We conclude that when you think too much you will be less succesful. We are interested in too many different things.

So we don’t know what we should channel this restless energy into. Ok, I put it into this website, in my classes, in therapeutic work with people and in soaking up knowledge. But am not naive, it’s extremely unlikely that anything am doing right now will develop into something big. It certainly won’t develop into a company the size of Amazon.

At the same time there’s so much to do in the not so promising field I find myself in, dictated by my naturally given skill-set, that I just roll from work to work. Is there a big future ahead? I highly doubt so. I’m like smart enough to kinda understand how money and economics operate right now, but am too dumb or too scared or too lazy or too addicted to working with people in an affectionate way to capitalize on that intelligence.

Only my wife believes this website will go from 10,000 visitors a month to 1,000,000 visitors a month.

She’s almost right, but this time I really thing she might be getting it wrong.

And will I feel so much better then? It would be nice if I wouldn’t have to leave the house anymore to make money. I don’t mind working, but I really hate traveling, it’s pure inefficiency. I could teach double the classes I have now if I would never have to travel from class to class.

Other topics we talk about are the challenges of raising a family, monogamy and -inevitable- Slovak women.

I sometimes think I might be too negative about Slovak women, but then I listen to other guys, even the very smart ones like this guy, and again and again, the cliches get confirmed.

During this conversation I got a picture of Slovak women as women who – if they are honest, which they might be incapable of – inherently feel SUPERIOR than men. If you carefully listen to them there’s this undercurrent of superiority. Slovak women are very sweet in the initial contact and then all of sudden they turn into domineering dictators who feel morally superior than men, no matter what they do. How can Slovak women be so confident in their behavior? Note: in their behavior, on the inside I’m sure it’s different’

The guy I won’t mention by name says: ‘They hear all the time how beautiful Slovak women are and so many guys are always trying to sleep with them that they derive a huge sense of their value from that.’

It’s becoming a taboo to say it, but, yes Slovak women are often beautiful, but they are also a lot of the time so predictable as to be almost useless.

Maybe people don’t believe me when I say that, ok, Belgian women don’t usually knock the air out of your lungs when you see them, but, boy, they are so, so funny and so fun to be with.

If I wasn’t such a superficial bastard who wants to be with a model like my wife, I might have married a Belgian one. Luckily for me my wife seems to be the opposite of all the bad cliches concerning Slovak women. I think it’s because she never realizes until she was already way in her twenties that she’s so beautiful. Who knows what would have happened if from a young age she would have had constant confirmation that she was o so hot?

Maybe she would be one of those stone-faced, dolled up ladies you see driving around in huge, luxurious cars at any moment of the day in Bratislava. Going places, but definitely not to work.

And you see, am incapable of making a short post, because I’m too lazy to edit it. I already want to vomit the next thought out of me.