The snap

I was on the couch, headphones in, listening to Sam Harris describe something I’ve been feeling for weeks without knowing what to call it. He talks about the moment when you suddenly realize — oh my God, I was not there. You were gone. Not asleep, not distracted, just — absent. And then you’re back. And everything is just this. Just now.

I’ve been having that more and more lately. Walking home, cooking, sitting on the train. I’ll suddenly go, oh whoa, I’m Bram, I’m here. And it’s weird. It’s a little scary, actually. Because it feels like you don’t make memories when you’re in it. It feels like time just passes. Like your life is slipping through while you’re busy being present in it, which is a strange thing to be afraid of.

Sam Harris would say that’s a bad question — the memory thing. That there are questions which direct you into territory where no sensical answer exists. And maybe “but what about my memories?” is one of those. Because memories will come. They’ll pop up in the moment. I don’t need to control that.

In Perfect Days — the film — the main character does very little. But what he does is keep photo books. One photo a day. Always the same kind of photo: him at lunch, a tree in the sun. And every single day he’s like, wow. In that snap. I’ve been thinking about getting a physical camera. Not my phone — my phone is a tool, it shouldn’t be central to my life. Something separate. Something I bring when I go do things that give me joy. Not every day necessarily, but when I feel something strongly that I want to remember. One photo. And if at the end of the year I have a book with those photos, together with all the notes I make, that’s insane memory-keeping. Everything else I can let go.

Here’s what I think God is. God is the love that you feel in that pure consciousness. Love in snap form. That’s God. And God knows, and God is the one you should follow, and the one that will tell the truth, and the one that will create pain. And then there’s the devil, which is fear and anger — also in the snap, also right there. And then you go more abstract and it becomes really true and nobody understands it anymore because it’s freaking abstract. So you simplify it into stories. And then you oversimplify, and you get really weird conclusions, like that you cannot be gay. Which is so not the point.

I’ve been reading the Gospel of John. The way it opens: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. That word, in the original, is Logos. Same concept as in Stoicism — the fundamental flow, the higher order. And in Buddhism it’s the Dharma. Same thing. A quantum field throughout the whole universe that is fundamental to all the other fields. Christianity basically took Stoicism and said: yes, all of that, but also we’re sending someone to Earth to speak for it. Name’s Jesus. And then you get the whole thingy.

Marcus Aurelius wrote a lot about death. Like, maybe 10% of his Meditations. You will die, and then the people who remember you will forget you, and then they will die. I don’t fully get those passages yet. But maybe it’s this: that to live a proper life, death needs to be close. And that’s okay. That’s the Logos. That’s nature’s way.

I’ve been learning about spiral dynamics. It’s a model for how human consciousness develops — from survival (beige) through tribal belonging (purple), power-driven ego (red), rule-based order (blue), competitive individualism (orange), empathic collectivism (green), systems thinking (yellow), to something like integral awareness (teal). Each level oscillates between me and we. And each level thinks it’s the final one.

The Western world lives mostly in orange. Donald Trump operates in red — ego, fear, hierarchy. Obama, maybe Gandhi — those feel more like yellow. I try to believe I’m reaching for yellow, which is where you start thinking in systems while still caring about everything that green cares about. And teal is where Dembrane lives, at least in aspiration. A teal society. But how do you build a sustainable one when the USA is sliding from bright orange back down to red?

There’s a question that came up that I don’t have a clean answer to: does more consciousness mean more suffering? If I pull a wing off a fly, it’s in the snap — its whole experience is pain. If someone pulls off my arm, I’m also in the snap — my whole consciousness is pain. Maybe the voltage is higher in my brain, but there’s also a bigger brain to process it. Maybe beige is fine. Maybe the fly is fine. I don’t know.

Blaise Pascal — the physics guy — said all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly alone in a room. I love that. I truly believe it. If everyone could meditate and find peace within themselves, you would not have Donald Trump. That man has not found God. He cannot sit still in his own body. I strongly believe that.

Which makes me think: maybe the most impactful thing I could do is not improve human collaboration but improve human meditation. Human spirituality. But then I notice that all the people who realize this become monks and disappear from society. So there’s a problem.

I love the idea of being an ethics-driven leader. Not entrepreneur — that’s really orange. Leader. But how? There’s the Rutte route: play the system, nail the game. And there’s whatever I am — philosopher, innovator, researcher. I don’t see myself as a cold-ass executor. I already feel it at work: I would love fewer deadlines and more thinking. But then I catch myself mid-thought — I’m not maintaining systems. Things are falling through the cracks.

And here’s what I learned years ago that I keep forgetting: words don’t change people. Actions change people. The way you behave next to someone is how they learn from you. Not by you telling them something. A 45-minute voice message to friends is fun but probably extremely ineffective. So I talk, I write, I learn. And then I just have to do my best to be 1% better tomorrow. And if I can introduce 1% of what I learned this evening into how I show up tomorrow, that’s amazing.

But then — and a friend pointed this out — I changed quite a lot during this very monologue. Through words. So maybe the real insight isn’t that words don’t work. It’s that words only land when someone is actually paying attention. When they’re in the snap. Which is rare. Which brings the whole thing full circle.

Some conclusions, then.

I like the snap. I want to stay in it. I want to trust my intuition more — at least for my age, I think I’m becoming a decently wise human being. I want to trust that even though everybody is convinced about their own intuition, mine is getting sharper. Even though I was raised to always seek the middle way, sometimes I’m just right and I should continue.

I want to lead. But I don’t want to pretend I’m something I’m not. I’m not a monk, I’m not a CEO of 10,000 people, I’m not Jesus. But those aren’t reasons not to try. Jesus was weird. The Buddha was weird. Weird is fine.

And I want to sit with what I feel rather than immediately designing a framework for it. Because I notice that pattern — in meditation, in leadership, in relationships, in everything. I reach for the model before the experience has taught me what it wants to teach.

So: sleep. Tomorrow, chop wood, carry water. And maybe bring the camera.