Why we hate humans so much

I grew up on a farm with a few hectares of land, along with some cows and sheep that needed tending. Together with my two brothers we would spend much of each day outside when the weather was nice, whether by ourselves, or with friends from the village, though during winter some work still needed to be done on the farm to get everything winter-ready. In our village it was quite normal to live on a farm and have this amount of space.

Not everyone in the village lived on a farm, of course, and they would have less space than us farmers did. Still, everyone had their own house, a garden and especially in the original village section (not the new construction), people tended to know just about anything about each other. For much of my life I grew up not really knowing or caring who of the people in the village were or weren't family members. We'd share everything anyway and be there when anyone needed help.

That all dramatically changed when my parents divorced and I moved together with my mother into a house in the nearby city. That was the beginning of what has now been more than a decade of city life. It has convinced me that there are virtually no redeeming qualities to living in a city.

It's not just me, either. Report after report shows that cities are polluted death traps which shorten lifespans [1][2][3], in addition to causing severe stress- and disrupted sleeping pattern-related health issues. Living in a city, or raising children in a city is pretty much one of the worst things that we humans have inflicted upon ourselves over the past thousand years.

Another massive problem that cities perpetuate is that of poverty [4], with those children being born in poor neighbourhoods generally being out of luck unless they can somehow escape from those environments.


All of this does raise the question of why we hate ourselves and our fellow humans so much. Why do we lie to ourselves about what is obviously a massive health issue? Why do we dream of moving up in society while simultaneously trampling others down as we try to move upwards? Why this rat race?

The general way of thinking is that a single human being simply has to do with less. Nobody needs an apartment that's more than about twenty square meters or so. They'd go by just fine. Just cram lots of sub sixty square meter apartments into a few massively tall blocks and stuff them full with people.

Which is exactly what we have been doing with livestock over the past decades, with battery cages for chickens, cramming pigs into cages just barely enough to hold them, turkeys and other poultry on the floors of massive halls with no room to move.

They figured out at some point that dimming the light to about 10 lux caused chickens in battery cages to not inflict as much physical harm on themselves, as these low light levels would trigger resting behaviour. As pigs that got crammed together in small spaces would start resorting to cannibalism - eating the ears, tails and other parts of their fellow pigs - their tails and ears would be preemptively removed, along with some of their teeth.


To me the way humans and livestock are being treated kind of blurs together. The whole bio-industry with their industrial levels of animal cruelty exists because the old ways of raising livestock was too expensive and inefficient. So they optimised those inefficiencies away without any consideration for animal well-being.  But cruelty-free/reduced cruelty meat, poultry and eggs cost more, so it'll likely always remain a thing.

Similarly, one points at how inefficient the average human being is. When not at an office doing useful work, or otherwise participating in the economy, they are just a drain on resources, filling space that could be filled with more humans. There's nothing to be gained by making it affordable for the average person to buy a house with a garden, and allow their children to grow up surrounded by nature instead of inside glass, concrete, stone and asphalt-lined cages. That's just not productive.


On our farm, our cows and sheep would spend time outside as much as possible, to eat the fresh grass and otherwise do their thing. We'd bring the cows in only for milking and during the night. Of course, we were painfully aware of this not being efficient. Other farmers had already begun to stop letting their cattle graze outside as much as we did, instead keeping them in the stables and feeding them either dried grass or cattle feed.

These days there's more of a market for meat, poultry and eggs that comes from animals who actually have seen some daylight during their lives, so it's more realistic to farm that way again. For humans there's no such hope, however. Most farmers have already quit their business and sold their farms to mega farms that are run by large companies.

Unless one is rich, this means that one will have to accept that the future for themselves and those around them means less living space, smaller apartments with more restrictions, more stress and more concrete and only a miserable patch of half-dead and dying plants surrounded by muddy grass (commonly referred to as a 'public park') to serve as a way to 'escape the city'.


Makes one wonder whether dimming the light inside cities to 10 lux might be a solution, along with the removal of any appendages which its inhabitants do not need to carry out their jobs anyway. Could solve all crime and violence issues in one stroke, while increasing productivity many fold

Maybe this is the perfect time to consider a career in being livestock..


Maya


[1] https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/health-impacts-of-living-in-a-city/
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/13/warning-living-city-seriously-damage-health
[3] https://www.who.int/sustainable-development/cities/health-risks/en/
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4570570/

Trying to make the world a better place, even as it wants me dead

Over the past months, a big focus of me alongside working on my upcoming book [1][2] and of course trying to find a new full-time job, has been setting up a new website to host the range of projects that I have started last year. These include a variety of hardware projects, involving the design of PCBs in KiCad for things ranging from building monitoring and control to the controlling of LED-based room lighting, and writing the firmware to drive these boards.

The website, Nyantronics.com [3], also features the biggest project of all: Internet of Plants (soon to be renamed Greentropia). This project focuses on high-density indoor farming solutions, as a way to solve the issue of food production in today's world, and the massive pollution and habitat destructions that this causes.

By having all vegetables and fruit grown in environments that are isolated from the environment, and by having many floors of this, it solves not only the problem of habitat destruction, but also removes the need for pesticides and herbicides to be used. Further it reduces the need to transport food across the globe, as well as plastic packaging.

Our focus is on moving to hydroponics and fogponics, so as to remove the need for soil and to optimise plant growth. A big part of making indoor farming like this work is to make it as energy-efficient as possible. So far we have been researching various grow LED options and of course hydroponics, fogponics and related to reduce the amount of energy required to produce fruit and vegetables, as well as look at making staple foods such as rice and soy beans work in this setting.

Looking at comparable efforts, such as the big EDEN ISS [4] project, we can see the potential here, and slowly we're bringing others into the project as well. It's a multi-disciplinary project, bringing together botany, biology, electronics, physics, anthropology, software development, mechanical engineering and many more fields. This makes it into an incredibly challenging but also incredibly fun project.


And yet, when I woke up this morning, I felt horrible. All I could see was this young child inside of me with adults yelling at it and generally being complete and utter jerks. The latter being mostly the people who are trying to kick me out of the apartment where I'm currently staying, merely on account of disliking me. Add to this the pressure of still being unemployed and having nowhere to go if I want to keep my unemployment benefits and health insurance.

Some days I'm not sure how things got this way. When you always tried to do things properly and always be nice and friendly to people, it's the worst kind of feeling when you aren't merely met with indifference, but with outright hostility. To know that you're not even a stain in the eyes of some people, but something far less.

And there's always that young child in the dark room. Terrified of adults. Never daring to trust adults again after what those adults did to her 5-year old self. The me today who is trying to get past those experiences, but who just keeps being reminded that adults are never to be trusted, not ever again.


I'm still hoping that I won't get kicked out of the apartment next month now that a date to have it forcibly cleared has been set. It's going to cost me a lot more money on lawyers and related adult fun to try and avoid this.

I'm still hoping that I will get that new job, get to move to a new place and that just for once these horrible things stop happening to me. I'm still trying. Still hoping.

I finally want that five-year old me to feel safe for the very first time. To move on and focus on these projects that can transform the world and the future of humanity. Not keep being stuck dealing with the same horrible types of people and revisiting the same old traumas over and over again.

Instead I want that fascinating future, working on cool projects that enrich me and humanity as a whole. To get this world away from this eternal darkness that threatens to swallow everything because there are certain adults who insist on living at the cost of others.


Maya


[1] https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/hands-embedded-programming-c17
[2] https://amzn.to/2Vl79wP
[3] http://www.nyantronics.com/index.php
[4] https://eden-iss.net/

Gender dysphoria and body identity dysphoria

Back in early 2005 I found myself watching a documentary on Discovery Channel on the topic of body identity dysphoria (BID) [1]. It followed this young woman who spent much of her time looking for a surgeon who would amputate her legs. Not because she had any medical problems, but simply because it felt 'right' to her to not having legs. She could recall seeing this person in a wheelchair as a child, with that person having the same kind of amputation as she ended up seeking for herself years later.

Not long after watching that documentary I found myself dealing with first the suspicion of me being transgender, quickly followed by the growing realisation that I had to be intersex. The memories of watching those BID sufferers faded to the background, until recently, when I found myself considering BID again, this time in the context of gender dysphoria and similar disorders.

Briefly put, BID is the desire to have invasive surgery performed on one's body in order to amputate healthy body parts, or to lose parts of one's body's functionality. The source of this desire appears to be in the brain's view of the body, with the functionality or parts that are deemed undesirable falling outside of this mapping.

For BID sufferers amputation or induced paralysis appears to be the only real solution, as ethically convoluted this solution may be. This is similar to with gender dysphoria (GD), where those affected will describe a strong desire to have their genitals removed, along with many other characteristics of their body. So-called sex-reassignment surgery involves the removal of one's existing genitals, and the surgical creation of a facsimile approximation of the opposite sex's genitals.

In both cases the hope is that by giving in to the desire for surgical interference, the psychological suffering will cease, and the person can live a normal life again. In the case of BID, the suffering can increase to the point where the person will self-amputate. Both BID and GD are very real forms of suffering, without a clear solution, or cause.


Looking back on the past fourteen years that I spent dealing with my intersex condition, I can see the many choices that I had to make in order to find myself. Most strongly of all, I can see the weird medical attitude towards BID, GD and intersex cases.

With the first, there's little inclination by doctors to assist surgically. With the second it's becoming easier and easier to the point where even children can apply, and with the third 'normalisation' surgery is forced on unwilling intersex individuals - including infants - but actual medical help is not available.

I consider myself fortunate to not have any kind of dysphoria or medical disorder. Yet I'm not blind to the horrific irony that while BID and GD require intense psychological and medical attention and are met with guarded caution, the medical approach towards intersex is one of overly enthusiastic surgical intervention.

With intersex there's no protocol, real-life test, psychological evolution or the like. Nobody will weigh the ethics of chopping up the genitals of an intersex infant, or ask whether it's proper to subject an adult intersex person like myself to psychological pressure to undergo 'normalisation' surgery and to be repeatedly told that I am not capable of making decisions myself, that I should rely on the doctors.

With BID and GD individuals are born with a problem. With intersex individuals are born without a problem, but have problems created for them.

I wish all three groups could get the help that they need.


Maya


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_integrity_dysphoria

The future I want

Figuring out what life means to oneself is a big task, one which most people never really get around to finishing. One can just follow the well-trodden path in front of one, feeling okay about the whole deal. To then vanish without much of a trace, never having affected the world much.

For me such a thing has never worked. To me the world has always been filled with possibilities, infinite things to learn and endless ways to improve everything for everyone. All it takes is a little bit of elbow grease and a big imagination.

That's kind of how I ended up starting this new project this year, called the Internet of Plants [1]. Originally just a cute little project to automatically water single plants, it has since drawn in a number of people beyond myself, with the scope expanding to high-density indoor farming, using LED lighting and automated irrigation as well as hydroponics.

This project is now on the verge of setting up its first small-scale growing operation, using about five square meters of shelf space with the goal to grow everything from lettuce and herbs to strawberries, passion fruit and more. Long-term we want to look at reducing costs sufficiently to make it possible to economically grow staple foods like rice.

The reasoning behind this is that if high-density indoor farming were to become cheap enough, it'd mean that food production could move close to where people live, valuable farm land could be freed up and returned to nature, even as food transportation, insecticide and herbicide all become rare sights, with massive benefits to the environment.

With each indoor farming operation being a completely isolated and sterile environment, there would be no run-off of fertiliser and the like into the environment, and crops could be grown anywhere, any time, with minimal loss and other compromises.


What excites me about this project is that it is both very taxing on those working on it - combining fundamental R&D, biology, physics, engineering, electronics and many more disciplines into a single project - yet the potential pay-offs are likely to be massive.

Over the coming years we could slowly begin to change the world economy, resolve many causes of food scarcity and related issues, while providing the technology and documentation for it as a fully open project. Truly, it's not meant to make a buck off anyone, only to make the world a better place. Not just for ourselves, or me alone, but for everyone.

To protect the environment, give countless people a better, healthier life and ensure that humanity's future on this planet for the coming centuries has been ensured, while putting a stop to countless destructive practices, such as the environmental destruction of habitats for the creation of farmland.

To me, this is the kind of project that truly excites me. Something that has meaning far beyond me, a hackerspace, a company or the next board meeting. This is what I want to do with my life. These are the kind of projects that I want to work on, together with other like-minded individuals.


The sad thing there is that as the preceding blog posts over the past years have made abundantly clear, I cannot see a clear path to this future. Many times I have thought that I was close to a break-through that would get me out of my current predicament and get me that quiet, peaceful life in which I can focus on making this future a reality. Instead I am still forced to fight for my life, fearful of slumlords and yet another knock on the door from police officers or others to either misguidedly 'help' me or inflict more suffering.

I cannot really think of any future this way. Not when my mind is frozen in fear just thinking about what horrors tomorrow might bring. I could have gotten any of those jobs this year and things would have been different, but for some reason I didn't. Maybe it's that I am intersex or that I have PTSD that makes companies afraid of hiring me. Maybe it's just that my way of thinking is too different and unsuitable for just focusing on developing the next iPhone or cloud-based webservice, soon to be forgotten or never even relevant to most of the world's population.


Hopefully I can still find the path forward from here to that future. I think it would be cool, and I hope others agree with me on this. Though my one success this year was to get hired by Hackaday to write articles for them [2], it's sadly not the kind of job that easily pays all of the bills each month.

Perhaps such kind of (remote) jobs are the things that suit me best: jobs which require a lot of independence, responsibility and ability to wing things successfully. I just haven't figured out yet how to turn this realisation into a path forward.

As always, help is more than welcome.


Maya


[1] http://www.nyantronics.com/iop.php
[2] https://hackaday.com/author/mayaposch/

Mental healthcare: madness within and without

A major part of me is still this five-year old child, lying curled up in that dark room, sobbing to themselves as the harsh, loud voices of those adults resonate in their ears. As the sensation of their hands groping, grasping and pulling on their body doesn't seem to want to fade.

It'll always be my fault. I'll always feel that I am the problem, that I just have to make things more difficult than they should be. How could I deny such an obvious fact?


Childhood abuse trauma is still special kind of madness. Left unacknowledged and untreated, it comes to define one's very existence as a child, as a teenager and finally as an adult. It means feeling unable to establish an emotional connection with others, as well as a general inability to rely upon and trust others.

It means struggling with a lack of self-esteem and of being overly critical of oneself. Of feeling that those adults back then were right to blame it on us, on somehow being responsible for the horrors that they inflicted upon us.

In my own situation, I wasn't aware of what had happened to be for the longest time. Not consciously, at least. It was always there, affecting my behaviour and life from right after those childhood events until the memories began flooding back, decades later.

It's horrible to see how much those events have changed me as a person, and affected my life. From turning that happy, carefree child into this withdrawn, quiet child who wouldn't even let their own mother touch or hug them, to the young adult and finally adult who simply could not get over what had happened. Who would remain stuck in that dark room, crying and feeling too terrified to move, let alone leave that room.


The events that happened after the initial traumatic events served to feed and reinforce it. From getting bullied during most of my time at school, to later having doctors and psychologists try to make me believe that I had to be transgender, or simply crazy, dismissing my intersex condition as an infantile fantasy.

Finally living together with an abusive flatmate for months with things totally spinning out of control at the end and losing all of my money and possessions. Months of being told how everything was my fault, how I wasn't doing enough and was weak and incompetent.

Then years of dealing with slumlords after moving to Germany, having them play the 'justice' system like a fiddle to make my life hell and drive me ever closer to either accepting homelessness or seeking to commit suicide once more. Of course everything is always my fault. It's pointless for me to hope for a better life, as me being alive makes things by definition worse. Such happy thought processes.


That last situation leading to me ending up at the psychiatric hospital for a few days recently. Not that this was the first encounter with mental healthcare, of course. I had seen plenty of this back in the Netherlands already, and had just stopped seeing my regular psychotherapist after one and a half years of weekly appointments, on account of this therapist constantly retriggering severe post-traumatic stress disorder triggers without seemingly understanding what was happening.

I'll be the first to admit that there's this madness inside my head that I keep struggling with, every day, with the darkness trying to claim my every thought and action. Some days there's too much darkness, because of other people's actions. Not because I want to feel like that.

Being at this closed, high-priority psychiatric ward was... a different kind of madness. While there, I was stripped of my identity, of any freedom and choice, while limited to this one, shared room and shared facilities. Shared with others who were struggling with their own madness and darkness.

There was the bossy woman, who seemed to be living some kind of fantasy, the tall guy who seemed to be mostly trapped inside his own head, always talking to himself and sometimes screaming for hours during the night. The girl with whom I shared the room had this massive burn on her left hand. It seemed like she could no longer use that hand, and was completely withdrawn into herself.

There were others. Each different. Each making me want to get away from that place. To return to the outside world, with the people whom I felt are more like me. Who show me the brighter parts of life. Not these shambling wrecks of human beings, who through no fault of their own are kept inside what is essentially a prison, where they are surrounded by the madness of others. Slowly forgetting what it is like outside, in society.


I am glad that I am no longer in that psychiatric hospital. For now. I hope I won't ever have to return there. But there are people here, outside the hospital's walls, who bring darkness. Who make one feel that life is about suffering and loss. That life maybe is too hard, that one cannot do it. That's it all too much, too painful.

I want to get away from this darkness. To get away from this current slumlord, to get that job, follow my dreams and ambitions, make more friends and hang out with the friends I have. To feel alive and happy.


Yet I fear that all there will be for me is the darkness of that silent room, with five-year old me lying on the floor. Alone, sobbing. Right before I give up for good.

I wish I could see the light.


Maya

Depression: the not so cute version of procrastination

A couple of days ago I watched this TED Talk video on procrastination. It covered the fine balance between the responsible side of one's ego and the part that is more interested in having a good time, the 'monkey'. Most of the talk was about how important it is to keep the monkey restrained, lest one ends up spending hours watching fun videos or browsing Wikipedia.

This made me think about how this all works for me. Those many days spent just aimlessly clicking around on the internet, working up the motivation to do anything, was that the monkey having fun instead of facing up to the obligations in life?

The thing there is that I did not and still do not have fun while fighting against this procrastination. It's more of a struggle, trying to get myself to a point where I can do anything at all, while feeling the weight of my existence and all that I'm failing at threatening to crush me.

The ironic thing there is that I have never been the type to procrastinate. As a child and teenager I was always working on big projects with seemingly endless energy. Then, starting with my parents divorcing and moving around the country that all began to change.

I still tried to continue projects within the limitations of losing access to the farm's resources and space, but as the pressure to resume studying or get a job increased, I abandoned most projects in favour of self-improvement projects, from driving lessons to figuring out my next steps in life. This mostly resulted in me slipping into a bad depression.

Cut off from the environment where I grew up, without any clear goals in life or how to start feeling happy again, I simply drifted along for a while until finding out about being intersex. To me that seemed like the key to solving a lot of issues and questions I had about myself. I would get medical help, get answers, maybe surgery or something, and things would work out.

Fourteen years later I still don't really have answers, and have many more questions than those with which I started. Worse, because of the treatment by doctors and psychologists, I now have severe Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). This is like depression times a thousand.

How does one keep motivated when one is beset by depression? When the expectation is that no matter what one does, it will just backfire? That everything which one attempts or does is futile? When one feels as if there's no point to one's existence, and it'd have been much better if one had never been born?

No monkey there, more like this black monster that sits on one's shoulder, discouraging and harassing one. Why even start that task when you know it's futile, or won't work anyway? Or maybe it's just that you know that you are incapable of doing it, or will just screw it up, or others will do a much better job, regardless of how many times you managed to pull off that same task with great success.

It's still procrastination, but unlike monkey-based procrastination here forcing and nudging the affected person will not help. Instead counteracting the black monster will have the best effect, by giving the person back their self-worth, their sense of reality and with it their reason to live.

It's not that we do not want to, it's more that we physically cannot, unless someone else gives us that little push and assists us so that we can get away from the black monster and with it the feeling of being incapacitated.


Maya

To let oneself be carried off by the current

Working long hours, rushing to make deadlines and still not feeling like one is getting anywhere. Going through job interview after job interview only to get rejected. Dealing with the crippling psychological impact of a looming eviction and the prospect of abandoning everything once more and resorting to the charity of others. That's my day to day life for months now.

Somewhere in the background is still the constant pains and discomfort of my body, even as it keeps going through physical changes, from the gradually vanishing scars and subtle changes to my face and skin in general, to the general development of female secondary characteristics. None of it explained, none of it making sense, no clue as to what will happen in the end. Is this just a normal puberty?

I can feel my sense of self, my ego, vanishing in the midst of this. My body is in flux, nothing around me in my environment is fixed or certain. I know what person I think I am, and what I want my future to look like, but all paths have been closed off, with no way forward. There's just waiting.

It feels so pointless to keep struggling, to wish for a better future. Even after so many years I have come little closer to my goals, or found a home.


Two weeks ago I found myself taken to the local psychiatric clinic by the police because my social worker was worried about me after a few remarks in an email I sent to her. I ended up staying two nights there, because they were afraid that I might hurt myself, or worse. I was let out during the day of the second day there, however, with the promise to return by dinner time. I was let out again on the third day, with the recommendation to visit a psychiatrist at their walk-in clinic.

Honestly, I do not want to hurt myself, or even end my own life, but this sense of pointlessness and futility is making me feel ever more disjointed from this body and my perception of reality. Thus I feel torn between the fun and interesting things in my life, the future I want to work towards to, and the strong desire to just give up and let all of those who wish me to vanish get their desire.

This body feels like a hindrance. I don't want to have to think about where to house it, how to feed and clothe it. How to deal with its changes and pains. Its mortality. I cannot comprehend human society. It all feels so wrong and distant, like a tune that's ever so slightly off-key.


There's still my third book to finish, a job to find, a home to find and move to. An eviction to avoid and chronic stress, PTSD and worrying abdominal pains to ignore. The question of whether this is possible at all doesn't apply, nor whether I still have the energy to continue. There's no choice, no freedom, no pity or empathy. Just the choice between continuing this struggle and giving up.


I'm still struggling and hoping, but it's so hard.


Maya