19: Henrik Karlsson - Cultivating a Life that Fits
Full transcript and all links: dialectic.fm/henrik-karlssonHenrik Karlsson (Substack, X) is an independent writer focused on "writing a few good essays." Two of them are among my most consistently recommended: on designing your life and finding your wife (or husband).Henrik's always written, but lived a winding path across software programming, music, poetry, biology, an art gallery, and other odd jobs. A few years ago, Henrik and Johanna picked up their life in Sweden to move to a small island farm in Denmark so they could homeschool their daughters. He now writes on Substack full-time and lives an unusual dual-life: one is remote and intimate; the other is connected and wide. My favorite theme of his writing is self-cultivation: introspection and action, designing a life that fits you by experimenting, how to think and how to learn, embracing being wrong and seeing past your blindspots, and living in concert with past and future selves.I also love his writing on relationships: how to find your life partner, why writing helps others see the inside of your head, how to use the internet as a serendipity machine for finding your people, teaching and parenting, and what its like to be around exceptional people who make your world bigger.He also writes about education, self-organizing systems, AI, exceptional childhoods, and more. But I find the topic rarely matters—all of his writing expands me. What a gift. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. May we all embrace the burden of freedom—freedom to iteratively unfold into a life we never could have imagined.
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Speaker A: Welcome to Dialectic, episode 19 with Henrik Carlsson. This is a special one. It's rare that you find someone whose writing moves you, and even rarer to find someone whose writing consistently moves you, that you find yourself coming back to and recommending again and again. And yet it's even rarer still that despite that person living on a small farm on a remote island halfway across the world from you, you find yourself passing through Copenhagen at the same time and get the chance to have a conversation. Fortunately, I got to do just that with Henrik.
Two of the essays I've most recommended in the last couple of years are Henrik's. The first, titled "Everything That Turned Out Well in My Life," followed the same design process. In it, he references the unfolding idea of Christopher Alexander and how the way we get to an ideal life is not through some grand vision, but by iterating along with the context, trusting that if we experiment and attune ourselves, we'll get closer and closer to a life that fits us. And the second, the first of his that I ever read, is called Looking for Alice, in which he describes how he found his partner Johanna.
It's romantic and invigorating and full of so much life. As I mentioned, Henrik lives on a small island in Denmark where he moved with his wife and daughters from Sweden. So that they could homeschool, as homeschooling is illegal in Sweden. As of recently, he writes on Substack full-time and thus lives this strange life, one that is offline and intimate with his family, and the other where he reaches tens of thousands of people with his incredible writing and connects with strangers like me all over the world. I focused the conversation on two core themes.
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