Against Dependency · For Sovereignty
Stop entering other people's systems.
Start building your own.
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Recent Letters
An afternoon in Mende, France. A gathering under a hazel bush by the river. What happens when you stay with a scene long enough to stop being outside it.
A walk through a half-empty French village in 31-degree heat, a memory of Da Nang, and a question that turns the lens around.
A camping chair from Decathlon, a black locust tree, and a river that stops being a line on a map. The day that changed the question.
A lake at 6:17 a.m., a fidgeter inside who wants to be elsewhere, and what it means to sit still — not for half an hour, but always.
Six weeks back in Europe, the list finally empty, the back quiet — and a morning on a hill above Le Creusot where something gets uncovered that was always there.
Nine years of France as a corridor. One Friday in a village that earns only a dot on the map — and something shifts about what it means to arrive.
Sitting in a café in Da Nang, six days before leaving Vietnam, I went under. What I found at the bottom had been waiting since September.
Reading Piranesi at quarter to four in the morning. What infinite halls, a woman's fire, and a Zen Garden reveal about the inner home you never actually lost.
The inner twelve: the bullseye that ignites when a spark lands right. On systems thinking, building with AI, and staying with a problem until it opens.
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Hi, I'm Dirk.
I've questioned the way things are set up for as long as I can remember, and for ten years that meant living out of a truck, moving with the work and the weather, long enough to know exactly what it costs to hand your days over to someone else's system. Dependency, in any form, still catches in my throat because of it. What holds my attention now is watching people build lives entirely their own, however different they look from each other, and the plain joy of working out what makes a system actually run, for them, and, I'd bet, for you too.