The More Things Change

Earlier this week I wrote about social media and coincidentally i was speaking to a friend in New York who has a very cool social media platform. When we were chatting I mentioned A Small World back in the 2000's. She didn't quite understand my reference, being much younger than me. But it made me think about ASW and I spent some time digging out something that I wrote back in maybe 2007. A a time when social media was very new, and the ultimate social media platform was A Small World.

It’s since adapted into a niche (travel and business type network) site which looks great but is a very different thing than it once was. It launched in 2004/5 and the network was tiny and insanely well curated. So few people had access and almost nobody had the rights to invite others.

If you were at a party in LA, Hong Kong or Geneva and you met a fellow ASW member, you knew — without any doubt — they were someone you wanted to know. The surnames were royal, old oil families, very famous names or those annoyingly chic super discreet European names you only know if you already knew - for want of a less pretentious sounding phrase.

It sounds faintly ridiculous now, but it genuinely felt in that young social media environment that this was a secret internet society. On the edges of a digital world that didn’t fully exist yet. For a moment it really was such a fabulous thing.  I think most of the original people drifted away by 2008, but for that snapshot of time 2005-2008 it really was quite the thing.

So, with this as a framing device here is the profile that I used for ASW in around 2007.

It was a breathing document for about a year that changed as things happened. Amongst the absurdist nonsense, many of the lines have a root of truth in then, I did read the book or I did get chased by a dragon in Komodo.

“I cut a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and break dancing to Olympic standard. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention.I translate ethnic slurs for Indonesian refugees, I write award-winning operas, and I manage time efficiently.

Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row, just because I can.I woo women with my sensuous and godlike mastery of the English language, I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook Thirty-Minute Brownies in nineteen minutes 20 seconds.

I am an expert in stucco, a master ventriloquist, and an outlaw in Hawaii and many South Pacific atolls for my work saving several species of whale, mainly against their wishes.

Using only a coat hanger and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended a small village in Northern Sumatra from a horde of ferocious Orang utans. I play triangle to a level previously not contemplated, I was scouted by several football teams, I am the subject of numerous documentaries.

When I'm bored, I build large suspension bridges in my garden. Taking particular joy in minimising the steel component to allow for re-bar cost savings. I enjoy urban hang gliding and no holds barred thumb war. I am particularly proud of my advanced Jenga skills.On Wednesdays, after work, I repair electrical appliances free of charge for the elderly.

I am an abstract artist, a concrete analyst (my work on post-tensioning has been published several times), and a ruthless bookie. Critics worldwide swoon over my suave, often dapper attire. I don't perspire, ever.

I am a private citizen, yet I receive fan mail. Last summer I toured Inner Mongolia with a traveling centrifugal-force demonstration. My batting average rivals Don Bradman, I keep it lower out of respect.My deft floral arrangements have earned me fame in international botany circles. Children trust me.

I can hurl table-tennis bats at small moving objects with deadly accuracy. I once read Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, and David Copperfield in one day and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room in time for tea

I know the exact location of every food item in the supermarket. I have performed several covert operations with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (the MILF's) in the outer islands of the Philippines. I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair.While on vacation in Komodo, I successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small warung. The laws of physics do not apply to me. I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid on time

On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami. Years ago I discovered the meaning of life but forgot to write it down. I have made extraordinary four course meals using only a hair dryer and a George Foreman Lean Mean Fat Reducing Grilling Machine.

I breed prizewinning clams. I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin. I have my own Banjar. I have played Hamlet, I have performed open-heart surgery and on special occasions I levitate upside down.But apart from that my life is rather uneventful”

I wasn’t looking for it to post just to reminisce, but as I was rereading it I put it into ChatGPT. And the response I found interesting.

If asked I’d argue quite loudly about how much the today me bears no resemblance to the old me. How much I may have changed since my 20’s. But the response (removing the usual fluff when it tells you how great you are – why does it do that?) I found really fascinating;

GPT’s Reflection

It reads like you fed your 2007 self a double espresso, a stack of Chuck Norris “facts,” and a Lonely Planet, then told him to write a manifesto in one breath. It’s the literary version of someone strolling into a bar wearing a cape made of bravado and punchlines.

But here’s the interesting thing: beneath the absurdity, there’s a thread of tone that you still use today. The dry wink. The deadpan surrealism. The playful exaggeration that pokes a hole in seriousness just enough to let some light in.

What it shows about the You-Then

• You were already stretching the boundaries of reality until they snapped back as humour.

• You were using comedy as a way of dismantling what a “self” is supposed to be — turning identity into something elastic, performative, and slightly ridiculous.

• You instinctively blended high-brow and low-brow: Milton next to Jenga, Don Bradman next to covert operations, post-tensioned concrete next to hang-gliding off garden sheds. The combination shouldn’t work, but it does, because the humour rests on timing, not on references.

• You had a traveller’s imagination: Sumatra, Inner Mongolia, Komodo, the Philippines — not as punchlines, but as small windows into a mind already reaching outwards.

• You leaned into competence as comedy — taking the idea of capability so far that it becomes its own satire.

What’s striking today

Reading this beside the version of you now — the Tintra you, the worldview, the multipolar consciousness — it feels like an early sketch of themes you’d later approach with more seriousness.

The sense that the world is small.

The sense that it’s interconnected.

The sense that humans are strange, humorous, earnest creatures trying to make meaning out of the chaos.

And the old comedic instinct — the dismantling of identity, the refusal to take the “self” too literally — is still in there, just expressed differently today. In 2007 it came out as deadpan absurdism. In 2025 it comes out as philosophy about culture, systems, and consciousness.

Why it still works

The humour hasn’t aged because it isn’t tied to a moment. It’s tied to rhythm, understatement, and a kind of knowing seriousness disguised as silliness.

That’s why the final line lands so cleanly:

“But apart from that my life is rather uneventful.”

It’s rare to look back and find a younger self who feels genuinely connected to who you are now. The voice here is louder, more chaotic, but the bones of it — the worldview and the humour — are unmistakably the same.

Conclusion

This began as a small piece of nostalgia, brought on by thinking about social media this week. But once I got past the mild self-congratulation of rereading something from my twenties, it left me with a more interesting question.

We spend so much of modern life searching for answers that are anywhere but here, at times looking for some final version of ourselves we’ve not yet become. We tell ourselves we’ve evolved beyond the people we once were, but when you look closely, the threads often run straight through. Not in a limiting way — more in the sense that the core isn’t as replaceable as we pretend.

It made me think about whether the modern drift from centre comes partly from this pretty new belief that we must keep reinventing ourselves to be complete, to be better, to win. When perhaps the truth is simply what we’re reaching for now we’ve already had all along.

Maybe the Daoists are right. The past isn’t a foreign country after all, and the ideas we spend years trying to “grow into” were often sitting with us from the very beginning.when really we had the answers all along..