AUGUST IS SLIPPING AWAYAugust officially ends on Monday, but we’ve decided to say goodbye to it today, the way it deserves, because the end of August should always be marked with
a minute of silence, a cold beer and a distant stare into the horizon.
August isn’t just a month. August is a way of looking at life. It’s the month we automatically associate with holidays, even if it’s been years since we had the kind of summer break we remember from childhood. It means waking up without an alarm, having no idea what day it is, eating at ridiculous hours and discovering that a shower, a pair of flip-flops and a clean T-shirt can be considered perfectly acceptable formalwear.
For a few weeks, even people without a penny to their name get to feel rich. Not because their bank balance suddenly has more zeros, but because they have something far more valuable:
time in which nobody is telling them what to do.
You can be sitting on your balcony in a plastic chair, drinking a can of beer while listening to your neighbor argue with his wife, and still feel as though life is smiling at you. Because you don’t have to work tomorrow. Because you don’t need to set the alarm. Because for a few hours, the world can keep spinning without you having to take part in it.
But everything comes to an end. The suitcases go back into the closet, the flip-flops return to the bottom of the shoe rack and the alarm clock reappears on the bedside table with the same asshole attitude it has always had. September arrives loaded with schedules, unanswered emails, school runs, traffic and people claiming that this time they really are going to start taking the gym seriously.
Most people will already have to start looking ahead to
August 2027 to fantasize about that brief period of the year when we can pretend we’re actually in control of our own lives. There are twelve months to go, but there’s no point thinking about it too much. We just have to keep surviving one week at a time, one public holiday at a time and one beer at a time.
Today, we raise a glass to August. To those who traveled to the other side of the world and those who never left their neighborhood. To those who slept in five-star hotels and those who set up an inflatable pool on the terrace. Because holidays aren’t always about going somewhere far away. Sometimes they’re simply about
nobody being able to force you to be anywhere else.
Until next year, August. You didn’t last long, you cost us far too much and, as always, you disappeared just as we were starting to get used to being alive.
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THE INTERNET, THE WORLD’S BIGGEST SCHOOLFor most of human history, learning something almost always depended on having someone nearby who knew how to do it. A parent, a teacher, a craftsman, or that one neighbor who could fix anything with a screwdriver and a couple of swear words.
If nobody around you knew how to paint, repair an engine, play guitar, or make sushi, chances are you weren’t going to learn either. You could look for a book, sign up for a class, or spend years figuring out by yourself what someone else could have explained to you in twenty minutes.
Video tutorials completely changed that.
Now we have a teacher available for practically anything we can think of. You can learn how to replace a roller-shutter strap, solder a pipe, grow tomatoes, build a computer, make a table, edit a video, or draw human anatomy properly. All you have to do is type in a few words and, more often than not, someone has already taken the time to record the entire process step by step.
It may feel completely normal because we’ve been living with it for years, but
having instant access to the practical knowledge accumulated by millions of people is one of the internet’s greatest achievements. Never before have we been able to learn so many things, from so many people, with so little effort.
Forty years ago, getting better at drawing required an art school, specialized books, and countless hours of trial and error. Today, you can watch every stroke, pause the explanation, rewind, repeat the movement, and practice at your own pace while someone shows you exactly where to place every line, shadow, and curve.
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Mastering the Force.