Philosophy · essays

Going Against the Stream — Finding Joy

Two essays from 2005, reread in 2025

The winter of 2005 I was on sick leave. Burnout and depression had forced me to stop. As part of the way back I worked in cognitive therapy, read selected books, kept a diary — and wrote. Two of the texts from that period are here: To Succeed in Going Against the Stream and the Road to a Better Society (12 November 2005) and Finding Joy in the Various Guises of Today — Living in the Present (23 November 2005).

I have let them stand verbatim. They are a document of their time from a different Fredrik — one in the middle of questioning everything he had believed in and worked for. But reading them today, twenty years later, I am struck by two things.

The first is that some of what I then took for futurology has actually happened. The EU's growing power, the normalisation of surveillance, the loneliness in a society where the workplace and the farmyard community no longer carry the social network, the instant-gratifier's logic of consumption which today has its own feed in every pocket. I was not right about everything — the municipalities remain, the county councils became regions but did not disappear — but the direction was sharper than I dared hope.

The second is that what I wrote about myself still holds. Otium and negotium. That what you have not found at home you will not find on the other side of the world. That sleep is a measure of well-being. That happiness is closer than you think. The words helped me then. I hope they can be company for someone else now.

Fredrik Nilströmer, 2025