Gunnar Rundgren på resa / on tour

You get an awful lot of time to think when travelling by yourself. I have this half year sabbatical partly for thinking, see if I can get some new bright ideas, that can keep me going for another twenty years or so. I will try to systemtize this a bit more after New Year. At this stage I am more brainstorming and meditating over questions.

Some slighty absurd or provoking:
- Cars kill more people than drugs in almost modern countries, so how come the car dealer is a respected citizen and the drug dealer is a criminal?

Some about how our society and economy work:
-How come that we could build all these railroads some 100/150 years ago, while today a new track of 50-100 km is such a major investment that it is hardly never done?
-Why do most people equate market economy and capitalism (and sometimes even democracy) then there is no such apparent link?
- would not a complete internalisation of external - environmental or social or otherwise - costs in to the prices of good more or less lead to a plan economy?

Existential questions
Why are people not happy?
How is it that we get less and less "time" despite the enormous gains in productivity?
-Why are so many modern things to ugly and crappy
- how come that in richer societies people care less about the dying and the dead while we often claim that life has a higher value in those sociaties compare to the poorer ones?


About nature and the human
Why would I care about wether a species is extinct or not?
-what are the egoistic motives for humans to care for nature
-would "nature" care if humans dissappear?
-Isn't "nature" only an abstaction of the the human mind. Without us there would be no nature, no ecology?

Just a few of many. I think that I collect those question and my reflections and see where they lead.
At the same time I am a bit suspiscious about this question-making, as the way to get insights. It is perceived as more humble and open minded to make questions instead of statements. But in the end most questions have so many assumptions (=statements) that that distinction is flawed.

enough of this

I did make the observation when I went by train, that the thinking is actually better on the train than on the bike. When cycling there is still too much mental energy spent on pain in the butt, how to reach next hill top and find a good place to rest. But in a way that was also my strategy - to "empty" the brain by biking and start the thinking later on, on that "unwritten page".