When we were in Greece, we saw many old houses in remote (and beautifully situated) villages. The only persons still living there are some elderly people. The villages are situated high on the mountains, mostly a few hundred metres of altitude up from sea level and more than 10 kilometres away from the ocean and the street leading to the “bigger” townships.
🙂 It is a wonderful experience to ride to these places by bike.
Living up there “you need a car”. It is what first comes to mind on seeing it. Yet these villages have been built at a time when cars were not yet invented. And in those days, people had to spend a lot of time just in order to get to their houses on foot or riding their monkeys.
But maybe those were the days when privacy had a chance of developing.
For me, privacy means that I go to work by bike or spend a little more than half an hour swimming in the public pool. Or at night, lying in bed and occasionally not being able to sleep. Or when I sit in a train and am at leisure.
Or when I write. That is a time when my privacy develops and grows considerably. And I also like making publicly known what I write. Basically, it does not really make a difference whether I write my ideas privately and lock them away in a diary, or whether I publish them. Because, after all, my privacy is never in danger, no matter how often my words are read: never, once, ten times or a thousand times.
Many people think we can no longer afford time for privacy today. But how much time are we killing with over-civilized activities? We let TV roll over us or totally immerse ourselves in computer games. Or hide in our cars.
Watching TV or surfing in the internet does not give you privacy. Driving a car might, but is the driver’s seat really the right place?
And if I get irrationally annoyed or spend endless hours trying to super-optimize everyday matters, I cannot see how that is supposed to promote a positive development of my privacy.
I am sure my esteemed readers noticed: this article is not about “bourgeois privacy”, which is allegedly very seriously and brutally threatened by the internet. Well, for me, it is rather unimportant.
RMD
(Translated by EG)
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