30 Questions
- finding better questions by posting a video a day for 30 days
This is a story. This is the story of how I now, on the evening of June 27th, 2014, am planning to make a video per day for the next 30 days. This is the story of the process of making those 30 videos, and what ramifications that process will have.
The context is this: For the next 4 weeks, I will be on vacation. This is the annual vacation of 2014. And I want to go so far away from my regular modus operandi as possible.
Who am I?
My handle is ‘DLTQ’, which means ‘Don’t Lose the Question’. You can find me on twitter.com/dltq, and elsewhere.
I am a 36 year old Norwegian man, living in Oslo. I guess that is all that matters for now.
I have made videos on blogs before. I don’t know how ‘good’ I was at it, but I did it a lot, and I was a pretty early adopter. Here I am, years later, older, wiser maybe, and I want to spend 30 days creating things, like I did back then, in this very different part of my life.
Since my site is at www.dltq.org, and I have been using the DLTQ handle for over a decade, I may just as well go with the theme of ‘Lost Questions’, or ‘Re-finding Questions’.
We enter adult life with certain expectations, hopes, dreams, and plans. We may want to become a lawyer, millionaire, rock star, or dentist. We may wish to be family-focused, or be a bachelor until we are in our 40s. We make millions of choices, some insignificant, others more defining into where our paths will take us.
And sometimes, we end up allowing those choices to define us more than needed. We become lawyers, dentist, or rock stars, and we let the expectations associated with that role limit us. I have also experienced this process: In July 2009, soon 5 years ago, I decided to change my life. Become more structured. Get married, have a child/children, go for the stable. And here I am, 5 summers later, and I look back, and I see that somewhere in all of these choices, paths, and exhausting work, I have lost some of my core questions. I lost the questions, which was what I warned my future self against back then.
This summer, I will make a video per day as a cleansing process. And I will challenge myself, to the very limits of my comfort zone, and then beyond, challenge myself to be as open publicly about what I think/feel/contemplate as I was 10, 15 years ago. [That is hard, very very hard. I dread it already.]
The videos may be 1 second long, or 10 minutes. They may be animations, or consist of simply minute upon minute of raw footage.
Here on medium.com/@dltq, I will explore this process, and I will share my meta-thinking about all of this, as well as links to the videos themselves.
I don’t know who will follow me on this path, or what kind of interactions we will have. But I will challenge myself harder than I have in years, and you will be the vocal or silent witness to it all.
See you on the flip side,
//Raymond M. Kristiansen