I've always been someone who seeks new horizons.
Not restlessly — not running from things. More like... a compass needle that keeps pointing toward the next unknown. The pattern has been there as long as I can remember: the pull toward something unfamiliar, the urge to reinvent, the quiet dissatisfaction with standing still.
And now I'm in Kongsberg, three days into a new chapter. It's Sunday evening, February 1st 2026, 21:19 CET. I'm sitting here asking myself the question I always ask at these thresholds: What is this era about?
I remember the exact moment I discovered videoblogging. December 22nd, 2004. I'd been blogging since 2000 — four years of text, of putting thoughts into the world through words on a screen. But that day, I stumbled onto something different. People were putting video inside blog posts. Moving images. Sound. Faces. Their rooms, their streets, their mornings.
A blog post was a letter to the world. A video blog post was a window. And suddenly I understood: you could manufacture windows. You could decide what part of your world to show, frame it, publish it, and let strangers on the other side of the planet peer through.
I spent the next several years doing exactly that. Shooting. Editing. Uploading. Contributing to a global community of people who believed that personal video on the internet would change everything. Some of us were right. Most of us couldn't have predicted how right — couldn't have imagined YouTube swallowing the whole movement, or smartphones turning everyone into potential videobloggers without them even knowing the word.
That was twenty-two years ago.
Now I'm 47, living in a house instead of an apartment, in a city of 28,000 instead of a capital. And the question isn't "what new medium?" anymore. It's "what new mode of being?"
The Kongsberg Era — if I'm going to call it that — might be defined by something unexpected: the train.
My commute to Oslo is 75 minutes each way. That's 2.5 hours per day, five days a week. Over ten hours weekly of forced stillness. No meetings. No interruptions. No one asking for my attention. Just motion and thought and whatever I bring with me.
Most people would see that as wasted time. Dead hours. Something to be endured or optimized away with podcasts and email. But I'm starting to see it differently.
What if the train is a laboratory?
Ten hours a week. Forty hours a month. Nearly 500 hours a year of protected time where no one can reach me, where the landscape scrolls past like a meditation, where I can build things that have nothing to do with my job. My off-work systems. My parallel infrastructure.
The videoblogging discovery in 2004 happened because I had time to explore. Time to stumble onto things. Time to follow curiosity without a deadline. The train might give me that again — not despite the commute, but because of it.
I don't know yet what I'll build in those hours. AI systems, probably. Writing, certainly. Maybe something I can't imagine yet — something that only emerges after the hundredth ride, the two-hundredth, when the rhythm of the train has become so familiar that my mind is finally free to wander into new territory.
The eras of my life have always been defined by what I was building, not where I was living. The blog era (2000-2004) was about finding my voice in text. The vlog era (2004-2009) was about presence and immediacy. The corporate era (2009-2021) was about systems at scale, about learning how organizations process complexity. The transition era (2021-2026) was about... letting go. Unlearning. Making space.
And now?
I'm in the gap. The liminal space between eras. The new one hasn't crystallized yet. I can feel it forming — something about AI, something about teaching, something about the intersection of human and machine cognition — but it doesn't have a defined name yet. It doesn't have edges; it is more like a fog of possibilities.
Maybe the Kongsberg Era will be the one where I stop chasing horizons and start building them.
Not seeking new worlds to discover, but creating new windows for others to look through. Workshops. Systems. Tools. Ways of thinking that I've accumulated over 25 years of digital life, distilled into something teachable, something shareable.
Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the era will be about something else entirely — something that only becomes visible in hindsight, years from now, when I look back at these early Kongsberg days and finally see the pattern that was forming while I was too close to recognize it.
Either way, I'm here now. The train is waiting. The laboratory is open.
Let's see what gets built.