Month: March 2025

Half of Sweden has been coughing since last fall – whatever virus the aliens have release is really doing a number on us. Dry coughing is the new normal, but last week I came down with something more serious, and this past weekend has seen me violently coughing up enough lung tissue to feed a small family, and I’m so fatigued that just walking up the stairs is taxing.

It’s not as bad as back when I had Covid but according to my sportswatch my SpO₂ dipped well below 80% some nights, and my average is hovering under 90% – during the pandemic the recommendation was to seek a hospital if you went to 92% so my blood oxygen levels are really shit. I mean, they are shit even in normal circumstances given my asthma, but this weekend was truly a giant pain.

And as much as I have hated hacking and spitting all day, I can only imagine the panic if I’d become too weak to even cough up the garbage that the infection is producing in my lungs: I’d literally be drowning in it. So: despite having torn my throat raw and given my abs the most intense workout in years, I’m thankful that I’m in good enough shape to be able to cough.

As a side note, this ordeal got me motivated to finally read the Kurzgesagt book Immune: A Journey into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive and we truly are made up of an aweinspiring collection of mechanisms. I can recommend the book if you’re looking for an easy introduction to the human immune system – it’s accessible and pedagogical, just like their videos.

Crossposted at Linkedin, which is my most active community outside of NFL and Reddit.

The increasing polarization of both international relationships as well as intra-national politics has a radicalising effect. As expected, much of it is generated by the perfect storm of power politics and the dismantling of multilateralism that the current US administration is enacting:

Mike Masnick at Techdirt wrote “Why techdirt is now a democracy blog (wheter we like it or not)” and over at Science Magazine Derek Lowe published a scathing summery of how it impacts science (and the attitute towards science): The Continuing Crisis, Part VII: An Overview.

Over at Reddit there’s a clamp-down on “offensive speech” which has had a chilling effect on the discussion, and subreddits doing proactive self-censoring and in some cases even banning ambiguous words and names:

All of this mirrors the Global Risk Report that World Economic Forum put out, which should be required reading: Global Risk Report 2025 homepage

The point of the report is not that their short-term predictions are prescient, but that human short-sighted focus on current risks – very real and dangerous as they are – hides the long term problems we should address: global warming, pollution and biosphere depletion, increased national and interantional polarization, the super-ageing societies reliant on immigrants that become second-rate citizens or guest workers.

So perhaps by looking closer to home, and looking further ahead, we could start to discuss not only what we are afraid of today, but what we gives us hope for tomorrow in our societies? Becuse I dearly want to feel more hopeful, and rather than doomscrolling and complaining, is there something I as a UX designer and futures studies practitioner can do to make you feel better?