Weekend Edition of The Best Year of My Life (So Far) Day 6, 7 & 8 Warnings, Manuals, and the World We Live In

Some books age gracefully.

Others age uncomfortably well.

This weekend, I found myself at our small countryside cottage — the kind of quiet place where time slows down just enough for thoughts to complete themselves. I wrote what I can only call a slightly longer weekend edition of my 365 journey, and I realised something I have been circling for a while:

To understand the world we live in, we need analysis.

But to endure it — and contribute to it — we need inner discipline.

It was from that stillness that my mind returned to two novels I first read as a teenager: George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

Both were written as warnings.

Both now read like commentaries on our present.

Orwell: the denial of reality

Orwell imagined a future where power is maintained through fear, surveillance, and the systematic denial of reality — where citizens are told to distrust not only information, but their own senses.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.”

It is difficult not to hear that line echo today, as facts are dismissed as opinions, violence reframed as necessity, and truth reduced to tribal loyalty.

In Orwell’s world, the danger is blunt:

a boot on the face, forever.

Huxley: the drowning of meaning

Huxley, by contrast, feared something quieter — and perhaps more insidious. A world where books would not need to be banned because no one would care to read them. Where distraction replaces repression, and comfort dulls the instinct to question.

One feared the boot on the face.

The other feared the soft pillow.

What makes our moment particularly unsettling is that we are not living in one of these futures — but somewhere in between.

Truth can be denied.

But it can also be drowned.

Not through censorship alone, but through noise: a constant stream of content, outrage, and distraction — until attention itself becomes scarce, and seriousness begins to feel like an inconvenience.

Applebaum: authoritarianism as a network

That is why Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy, Inc. feels so timely.

Applebaum does not describe a single ideology or regime, but a system of cooperation: authoritarian leaders learning from one another, supporting one another, and refining the art of staying in power without belief, conviction, or even coherence.

Autocracy today is less about grand visions.

More about cynicism.

More about control without justification.

It does not always arrive wearing a uniform.

Sometimes it arrives in a suit.

Sometimes it arrives through “normalisation.”

Sometimes it arrives disguised as fatigue: why bother, nothing matters anyway.

Re-reading Orwell and Huxley alongside Applebaum, one realisation stands out:

The defence of democracy is no longer only institutional.

It is cognitive.

Cultural.

Personal.

Essential.

It requires the courage to trust one’s eyes and ears.

The discipline to resist constant distraction.

And the willingness to care — even when apathy is easier.

Hammarskjöld: the inner line

There is another voice from the past that feels particularly present today: Dag Hammarskjöld.

In Vägmärken, Hammarskjöld reflects not on politics as spectacle, but on responsibility as an inner discipline. Written in solitude, never intended for publication, his notes remind us that leadership begins long before it becomes visible — in restraint, humility, and moral clarity.

It is no coincidence that he sought stillness.

That he returned, again and again, to landscapes that made him quieter — and therefore clearer. His beloved Österlen was not an escape from responsibility, but a way of preparing for it.

Where Stefan Zweig documented the collapse of a world, Hammarskjöld tried to hold a line within himself as the world fractured around him.

Not optimism, but integrity.

Not certainty, but steadiness.

Perhaps this is what we need to recover: not louder reactions, but stronger inner foundations. Not constant commentary, but the ability to think — slowly, carefully, independently — even when the world urges us to do the opposite.

A farewell that still echoes

Even today, Zweig’s farewell echoes beyond history — from literature to music. When Pet Shop Boys wrote “Auf Wiedersehen,” it was less a tribute than a quiet recognition: some losses continue to speak to us, long after the world has moved on.

Because civilisation does not disappear in an instant.

It unravels.

And then one day, we realise it is gone.

A choice

These books were written as warnings.

What we do with them now is a choice.

To refuse denial.

To resist distraction.

To remain human — and awake — in a time that rewards the opposite.

And to remember that while history is shaped by institutions and power, it is also shaped by something smaller, quieter, and often overlooked:

The inner discipline to keep one’s moral compass intact

when the world is losing its direction.

Mathias Knutsson