Vinay Gupta

Watch this space for a first taste of Vinay Gupta's story.

Dougald Hine

Dougald checking online content in the balcony of his “office”– the Royal Festival Hall in London

The first time I met him, there was no question that Dougald had presence. When he went on stage, he captured everyone’s attention on the first word. I mean it quite literally: The first word was “Wheeeeeeeen?” howled for long enough for everyone to take in every aspect of his impressive image: the long gothic coat, the leonine mane of hair, the high domed forehead, the fiery eyes.

When I interviewed him, he was short of sleep and his presence was somewhat subdued. But even on a low day, Dougald is a force to be reckoned with. When he is explaining something, he often breaks in the middle of a sentence to make a side remark that shows he’s fully aware of the complexities of the matter, and then gracefully returns to his main thread, retaining perfect grammatical coherence all along. At one point in the interview he complained about a Radio 3 project to identify emerging public intellectuals that excluded anybody who didn’t belong to a university, and he didn’t need to say that he sees himself as one of the intellectuals that is shaping the ideas of this age through his projects and Internet presence. For anyone that knows anything about him, it’s quite obvious that he is.

The reasons for his project start with his own experience at university. “I had a very confusing experience at university. I remember at various points in my teens well-meaning people saying: ‘Look, you’re bright. Keep your head down, work hard, get to Oxford and you’ll meet people like you.’ I got to Oxford, and I didn’t.” The main problem? “We were given tools for thinking by which we were able to deconstruct everything and anything. It was having your ability to create and sustain a world view destroyed without any support or guidance for the recreation of a new world view at the end of that process. It was as if, unwillingly, our tutors were hacking us to pieces and then throwing us as dog meat for the management consultancies that were coming along to hoover up my contemporaries. Institutions like Oxford at least retained some nostalgia for learning pursued for its own sake. But it had been a generation since anyone took this seriously at a policy level. Rather than the focus being on the intrinsic pleasure, joy, fascination and playfulness of learning, the university is a mechanism for getting the best job you can get, it’s a mechanism for the economy, the employers getting the best new employees they can get. And that was broken at every level. It wasn’t doing a good job for the employers or the graduates on fulfilling that desire. And it was also broken at the level that it communicated to you a very unhelpful set of messages as to what life was about: ‘Life is about getting the best job you can get. You can measure that by social status if you’re sophisticated, by money if you’re not. The centre of your life should be the thing you do as a job. There is such a thing as a career.’ On a superficial level, I came out with one of the top degrees in my year in my subject, but I came out damaged by the experience.”

The rest will be on the book. Be good to me and you may get one.

Thoughts

I have met many people who feel that they were damaged by university. The day I read the first line of Allen Gingsberg’s Howl, ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked’, I knew it’s as true or more today as it was then. Some of the brightest people I’ve met were also the greatest misfits, and I couldn’t help the creeping feeling that they fitted so badly because of, not in spite of, being so bright. My husband was one of them, but by the time I met him he was already falling into a downward spiral of alcohol and a very varied assortment of drugs from black, grey and white markets. He died of an overdose eight years afterwards, for his whole life the fractal peg that wouldn’t fit the square hole.

I have often wondered why it didn’t happen to me, why I never caught the existential angst so typical of Generation X. I had all the risk factors: intelligent, different, belonging nowhere in particular. But something made me immune to the disease, at least partially. I never had any of the worst symptoms: no utter lack of direction in my life, no cynicism as if I were breastfed on scorching corrosive acid, no deep desire to game the system as the only logical response to it.

The rest will be on the book. Be good to me and you may get one.

Barbora Patkova

Barbora behind a bike generator, inside the container where Magnificent Revolutions keep bits and pieces

As far as I can tell, Barbora hasn’t done anything to look especially good for the interview. If she’s wearing make-up, it’s pretty subtle. But then, it’s quite apparent that she doesn’t have to do anything to look good: her figure is just right, her hair is a lovely shade of blonde, her features are chiselled, her eyes are clear and grey, her smile is stunning. It doesn’t surprise me when, at one point in the interview, she confesses that as a teenager she dreamed of becoming a model. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to picture her in any advert holding any product, associating her natural beauty to some company’s brand.

But Barbora has gone a long way away from those teenage dreams. Today, Barbora is best known for Magnificent Revolution, a project that demonstrates how much energy it takes to power some things we take for granted. In her own words: “We run events, cinema events and music events, and the whole thing is based on pedal power. It’s powered by the people. With screenings, people ride to the them and they can hook the bike to the generator and they can power the screening itself, they’re powering the audio-visual equipment. With the music, people are powering the band, this is a new relationship between the band and the audience. The ultimate idea behind it is to experience a connection, to be able to see something that you normally can’t, which is energy. When you say to somebody 1,000 Watts, it’s completely meaningless, because they have no way of imagining what that is. By being able to be a physical part of it, being there creating electricity, feeling what is 50 Watts or 100 Watts from a human perspective, people can start feeling these connections that then can help them later in life when they’re thinking about saving energy. We’re not telling anyone anything, we let people experience it. It’s something that comes from within.”

A person generates 50 Watts on average, but there is a lot of variability among different people. Have you ever seen on the Internet one of those pictures of a geek powering a laptop by pedalling and you wondered if that’s possible? The answer is yes: “You can do it, but it’s better to charge the laptop while it’s turned off. If it’s running, it depends what you’ve got open, what you’re working on. It can be 50 to 70 Watts. It’s at the high end of what you can power, but of course it depends on how fit you are.”

The rest will be on the book. Be good to me and you may get one.

Thoughts

Magnificent Revolution brings to life a concept I learned about as a child: the energy slave. I learned this from a wonderful book called How energy works, a typical product of the oil crisis of the seventies. It explained, with clear, attractive pictures and simple explanations absolutely everything you need to know about energy: what it is, how it can be produced, the laws of thermodynamics, and more. One of the beautiful two-page spreads of the book showed graphically the concept of energy slave, with a family of four standing on top of a mountain of human figures, representing their energy servants.

An energy slave is the amount of energy that a person can generate using their muscles. Different authors give it different values - it depends on how fit your slave is – but it’s generally estimated that the average person in the Western world uses roughly as much energy as would be produced by 100 slaves. The Europeans and Japanese use somewhat less, the North Americans somewhat more. Roughly thirty of those slaves (the fastest, presumably) are pulling cars, buses, trains, and even the planes that we use. Twenty-three are pulling the tractors and other machinery that produce our food.

The rest will be on the book. Be good to me and you may get one.

First interviews arranged

The first interviews are trickling in...

Dougald Hine - http://dougald.co.uk - 6th March

Caroline Lucas - http://www.carolinelucas.com - Sometime in March, TBD

Vinay Gupta - http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog - Sometime in March, TBD

In the beginning

This blog is to record the progress of a book I'm writing, with the working title What am I going to tell my grandchildren?

This is about people who think in the long term. I'm looking for people who have done a fundamental change in their lives as a result of thinking about the long term horizon: at least 20 years, but if anyone is thinking in terms of centuries, so much the better!

The change can be moving to a completely different place, a radical career change, a complete overhaul of their home, or any other significant lifestyle change. The conditions are:

• The change must be significant. Sorry, changing all your lightbulbs doesn't count.


• The benefits of the change must be mainly long term. It's fine if the change has some short-term benefits, but there must be easier and simpler ways of getting those same short-term benefits.


• The future you are expecting sounds like a real possibility. If everybody around you is telling you that your ideas about the future are plain crazy, I'm probably not interested. However, if everybody but one or two people think you're crazy, I am interested.


• You live within 100 miles of London. That's because the interviews will be face to face and that's as far as I'm travelling.

If you would like to be interviewed for the book, please contact me at:

Drop me a few lines telling me about your change and why you did it. I'm expecting the book will contain around 50-60 stories, which means I'll be interviewing around 100 people.

I've picked this theme because I'm fascinated by the contrast between the current trends towards sustainability and how short-term most of our goals usually are. How can anyone live sustainably when they aren't thinking of the long term in their day-to-day life?

I don't care if your change doesn't have anything to do with the environment, I'm more interested in sustainability as a concept that applies to anything, from finances to family life, meaning simply "considering the long term, so that what we are doing now won't harm our chances of a good life in the future for us or for our children." This used to be the common mindset before the Industrial Revolution. Cathedrals were started by people who knew they wouldn't see them finished in their lifetimes. But at some point this mindset was lost.

I'd like to meet today's cathedral-builders, because they will lead by example tomorrow's sustainable children.

Note: This is a freelance job, in no way connected to The Guardian newspaper.