Pillar III — The Table, The Knowledge, The Joy
Food, health, and the skills to take care of yourself. Where Limbic Literacy protects against what harms you, Nourishment feeds what you need. The generative counterweight — knowledge, skill, and joy.
Prevention over treatment. Complementary medicine — not alternative, but alongside the regular system. Heritage that is at risk of disappearing.
Knowing what saffron is. Recognising seasonal vegetables. Culinary and medicinal heritage that vanishes once the last generation carrying it is gone.
System critique without joy turns bitter. Joy without system critique turns naive. Nourishment needs both.
It's not about how many years you've lived. It's about how you've lived those years. This determines whether you still have the energy to build something entirely new.
Source: Peter Attia, Longevity (The Penguin Press, 2023)
Why Big Tech suddenly cares about nuclear power.
Source: Bloomberg Green; IEA Global Energy Review; Neuralink technical papers
A routine built on compound movements and mobility solves more than any supplement ever will.
Source: Practical training experience, kinesiology
The school track does not determine what your child becomes. But the choice says much about what you hope it becomes.
Source: Observation of educational trajectories in education systems; research on school transitions
Your income can vanish. An asset keeps giving without you doing anything for it.
Source: Kiyosaki, Robert T., Rich Dad Poor Dad (Warner Business Books, 1997)
The question great art faces is not whether it is beautiful. The question is whether it disturbs your equilibrium.
Source: Susan Sontag, 'Against Interpretation'; James Elkins, 'What Painting Is'
By day 200 of a war, death tolls have become incomprehensible and nobody counts anymore. The world reorders itself around a conflict that has become permanent.
Source: War reporting 2022-2023; Zelensky speeches; Western media coverage Ukraine
Two continents, two visions of how you build a company. The differences go much deeper than money alone.
Source: Observations from Silicon Valley and European tech hubs
Billions of images and the question of where they come from.
Source: MIT Media Lab; Cathy O'Neil, 'Weapons of Math Destruction' (Crown, 2016)
Blood tests reveal what's actually happening in your body. Without that data, you're navigating in darkness.
Source: Medical practice, research literature
Happiness is not a state but a practice. The habits that calibrate it are simpler than we think.
Source: Various studies in positive psychology and observation of long-lived people
Wealth building doesn't start with picking the right ETFs. It starts with forcing yourself not to spend what you've saved.
Source: Bogle, John C., The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing (Wiley, 2007)
Why fine lace against your skin is more than craft. It is the boundary between function and desire.
Source: Lingerie historians, museums (Victoria & Albert Museum)
Eric Weinstein posed a sharp question: what happens when someone gets power without institutional restraints? And how does a democracy recognize the moments when the system itself becomes negotiable?
Source: Eric Weinstein, The Portal (podcast); Donald Trump, presidency 2017-2021, 2025-present
Peter Thiel teaches us where the real innovation opportunities lie: not in the visible playing field, but in the gaps everyone overlooks.
Source: Peter Thiel, Zero to One (Crown Business, 2014)
What our investment choices reveal about what we want to believe.
Source: Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letter (2024); various financial analyses
Health is not something you maintain casually. It is an active choice that must compete with everything else seeking your attention.
Source: Personal observation
Why we spend billions on repair and virtually nothing on prevention.
Source: Jaap Huibers, persoonlijk archief; T. Colin Campbell, The China Study (BenBella, 2005); Michael Marmot, The Health Gap (Bloomsbury, 2015)
The best designs do not stand out. They work.
Source: Dieter Rams, Less but Better (Gestalten, 2014); Kenya Hara, Designing Design (Lars Müller, 2007)
On the failure of collective memory and why 'never again' is a promise nobody keeps.
Source: Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny (Tim Duggan, 2017); Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt, 1951)
How cities are outpacing the nation-state and why that has consequences for how we organize our food.
Source: Benjamin Barber, If Mayors Ruled the World (Yale University Press, 2013); Parag Khanna, Connectography (Random House, 2016)
Pilot municipalities live, DigiD integration, link with 42 youth care regions. Freemium is expanding.
Why more measurement does not lead to more grip but to more blindness.
Source: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile (Random House, 2012); Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems (Chelsea Green, 2008)
Dozens of conversations, demo sessions, a pilot program that is starting. iRecord is here. The question is: who is participating?
On a building tradition that treats sustainability not as a label but as a starting point.
Source: Andrea Palladio, I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura (1570); Witold Rybczynski, The Perfect House (Scribner, 2002)
Not a replacement for your client tracking system. A coordination layer that runs alongside it. REST API, standard web architecture.
Technology is never neutral. The question is always: for whom was it designed?
Source: Langdon Winner, Do Artifacts Have Politics? (Daedalus, 1980); Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression (NYU Press, 2018)
Freemium costs nothing. The professional tier €10-25 per user per month. Less than one missed coordination.
Privacy as a design principle, not an afterthought.
Source: Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath (W.W. Norton, 2015); European Commission, General Data Protection Regulation (2016/679)
A response to the May 2026 CPB report on tax burden in the Netherlands. The system is progressive on paper and regressive in practice. The CPB names the pattern with full propriety, but cannot, from its institutional position, name the architecture that produces it.
Why digital resilience is not an individual responsibility.
Source: Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (PublicAffairs, 2019); Tristan Harris, The Social Dilemma (Netflix, 2020)
Full access, personal guidance, direct influence on the roadmap. No costs during the pilot.
Why the best buildings already exist.
Source: Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn (Penguin, 1994); Rem Koolhaas, Preservation Is Overtaking Us (GSAPP Books, 2014)
The region that is now starting a pilot will have a working solution in 12 months. The region that awaits has a problem.
Why the best public spaces are not designed for efficiency but for encounter.
Source: Jan Gehl, Life Between Buildings (Island Press, 2011); Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language (Oxford University Press, 1977)
A pamphlet on recovering the older, finer sense of the word "discrimination" — to distinguish, to tell things apart. On heritage brands across their life cycle, the inversion of quiet luxury, the object as tool rather than self-expression, and what is lost when a culture can no longer choose what to value.
The Dutch State Secretary frames the Utrecht grid freeze as a "temporary pause". The sector knows better: a new substation takes seven to twelve years. What this means for property owners, housing construction, social services, and anyone still underwriting the Netherlands thesis.
The Tigellino chain in Bologna serves tigelle pre-filled, from the kitchen. In Modena the press sits on the table and guests fill their own. The same bread, an inverted social logic — and a lesson in how to preserve tradition without lapsing into folklore.
An NRC interview with Dutch comedian Merijn Scholten about his new show Lemming offers — without any neuroscience or jargon — one of the sharpest public articulations of what we call Limbic Literacy.
What geopolitics has to do with your plate.
Source: Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved (Melville House, 2012); Timothy Snyder, Black Earth (Tim Duggan, 2015)
Two months of posts. The problem is universally recognizable, the resistance lies with purchasing and IT governance, not with professionals.
Why Europe can no longer tell its own story.
Source: Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe (Bloomsbury, 2017); Potgieter, Jan, Jannetje en hun jongste kind (1841)
How the most influential design school of the twentieth century forgot its own principles.
Source: Frank Whitford, Bauhaus (Thames & Hudson, 1984); Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (Yale University Press, 2008)
The Dutch Tax Authority's data vault is not an incident but a structural pattern. This paper analyses why concealment is rational organisational behaviour, why punitive responses are counterproductive, and what transparency architecture could address the problem at its root.
A case manager searches for the right contact person for three weeks. With a professional guide she could have tuned in on day one.
Why design does not stop at the drawing table and what that means for how we build organizations.
Source: Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World (Thames & Hudson, 1971); Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things (Basic Books, 2013)
The execution chart is a visual timeline that shows in plain language who viewed what data.
When price becomes the only measure, the ability to see vanishes.
Source: Jerry Saltz, Art Is Life (Riverhead, 2022); Don Thompson, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)
75% of the municipalities cannot achieve a balanced budget. iRecord's freemium tier costs nothing and requires no IT decision.
The problem is that we treat change as a problem.
Source: Ronald Heifetz, Leadership Without Easy Answers (Harvard University Press, 1994); Edgar Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2010)
Why organizations get stuck in their own methodology and what the alternative is.
Source: Henry Mintzberg, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning (Free Press, 1994); Karl Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations (Sage, 1995)
A Japanese aesthetic that the West urgently needs.
Source: Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi: For Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers (Imperfect Publishing, 1994); Soetsu Yanagi, The Beauty of Everyday Things (Penguin, 2019)
Youth care is not failing because there is too little empathy. It is failing because the state is not fulfilling its own function. Rousseau will not save Lex without Weber.
The Zembla documentary reveals all four classic characteristics of market failure in youth care. They reinforce each other because the information system that should make them visible does not exist.
A professional guide shows who is in the picture for each client. Free. No implementation. No IT decision required.
On March 26, Zembla aired "Children Nobody Wants" — at least 400 young people in solo placements in three years, and no system to coordinate.
Source: Zembla, "Kinderen die niemand wil" (Children Nobody Wants), 26 March 2026
NU.nl reports 395,000 unemployed. But the real number tells a different story.
Source: CBS StatLine, Labour participation; key figures, Q4 2025; Budget Memorandum 2015; NU.nl, 27 March 2026
Why we need the old masters to understand our own transformations.
Source: Ovid, Metamorphosen (8 n.Chr.); Rijksmuseum, tentoonstelling Metamorphoses (2024-2025)
The coordination problem is recognizable everywhere. The VIR phase-out makes professionals worried. No one mentions it by name.
Knowing what saffron is goes beyond following a recipe. It is a form of literacy that is vanishing.
Source: Pat Willard, Secrets of Saffron (Beacon Press, 2001); Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking (Scribner, 2004)
Signaling, matching, reporting — three core functions that will disappear without a successor. Technically it is solvable.
From kimchi to sauerkraut: how the world's oldest preservation method risks disappearing.
Source: Sandor Ellix Katz, The Art of Fermentation (Chelsea Green, 2012); Michael Pollan, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (Penguin, 2013)
60,000 to 80,000 multidisciplinary meetings per year, without a national system for planning or follow-up.
Why buying local is not a lifestyle choice but a trainable skill.
Source: Elizabeth David, French Provincial Cooking (Michael Joseph, 1960); Marcella Hazan, Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking (Knopf, 1992)
Most systems were designed before GDPR. Logging is technical, not readable. Compliance is not a checklist.
On the forgotten foundation of the kitchen and why your grandmother's recipe is medicinal heritage.
Source: Sally Fallon, Nourishing Traditions (NewTrends, 2001); Marco Canora, Brodo: A Bone Broth Cookbook (Pam Krauss, 2015)
The coordination problem hits families with multiple problems the hardest. The solution is not to register anymore.
92% of neighborhood teams have insufficient capacity to map the professional network around a client.
The Dutch Interior Ministry mapped the major trends facing the Netherlands. The connections between them tell a more important story than the trends themselves.
Source: Based on: Ministry of the Interior / BZK/VRO — "Trendscan: met welke trends moet BZK/VRO rekening houden de komende jaren?", version 2.x, January 2026.
Europe is in acute danger, but we act as if it will be fine. On a historical pattern of denial.
Source: Based on: Joris Luyendijk — "We zijn in acuut gevaar, maar blijven wensdenken over de VS", NRC Opinie, 13 February 2026. https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2026/02/13/we-zijn-in-acuut-gevaar-maar-blijven-wensdenken-over-de-vs-a4919693
The Dutch central government grew by 38 percent in six years. Nobody voted for it. Everyone benefited. And now everyone wants to cut back.
Source: Based on: Simon van Teutem — "Wie heeft ervoor gekozen om de overheid met 38 procent te laten groeien in zes jaar? Niemand", De Correspondent, 13 February 2026. https://decorrespondent.nl/16735/wie-heeft-ervoor-gekozen-om-de-overheid-met-38-procent-te-laten-groeien-in-zes-jaar-niemand
Why local councils struggle with affiliated organisations — and why ownership is the only real answer.
Source: Based on: Tom Plat, Marsha de Vries & Herman Uffen — "De illusie van grip: waarom verbonden partijen een wicked problem blijven", BMC, 19 December 2025. https://www.bmc.nl/actueel/de-illusie-van-grip-waarom-verbonden-partijen-een-wicked-problem-blijven---en-hoe-we-de-regie-kunnen-terugpakken
Professionals handle complex cases without knowing who is involved with the same client from other organizations.
The VIR is being phased out. 267 to 300 municipalities will lose their only national signaling mechanism — without an alternative.
On Demna's debut, the emptiness of our time, and the displaced who seek belonging in price tags.
Source: Rachel Tashjian, "Can Gucci make luxury AI?", CNN Style, 27 February 2026.
About the angry citizen, political simplification and the loss of stratification in society.
The caretaker cabinet has significantly amended the WAMS bill. Explicit consent carries more weight, not less.
Source: Dutch Government, WAMS bill
Viridian's design principle, applied to food.
About my father, complementary medicine and the revenue model of the health industry.
The iRecord demo is available for approved users. Discover the professional directory, citizen portal and legal-basis registration.
About the dish that changed my idea of cooking.
Being able to read a market is a skill. In any city in the world.
About groupthink, conformism and the courage to think differently.
About self-knowledge instruments, Big Five and the question of whether you can measure yourself.
The city as a teacher. About Monocle guides and traveling as a method.
Design is not aesthetics. It is a method of thinking about how the world works.
The recipe that is not a recipe. Why stock is the foundation of cooking.
Small country, big footprint. Almost twenty years later: is that paradox still there?
About forgotten vegetables, endangered cheeses and why culinary heritage matters.
Seven words that make an entire diet book redundant.
No ranking but five short stories about books and the moments when I read them.
How the profession of strategist has changed. From expert to co-creator.
About visions of the future, Monocle guides and the question of whether you can design a city.
Why start writing again. What has changed since 2011.
If many policies don't work, why does the government remain so attached to them?
Finding words for what you taste. An exercise in language and attention.
A simple dish as a metaphor for craftsmanship. Why the simplest things are the hardest.
About freedom, polarization and the courage to differ in opinion.
The relationship between food and health, between season and ingredient. Based on the life’s work of Jaap Huibers — sixty books, a practice, a radio column.
Cooking without a recipe card. Making broth. Reading a market, in any city in the world. A basic competence that was self-evident for generations.
The carbonara at Luciano’s. The herb garden at a market in Oaxaca. The dîner pensant at a long table. Joy is also prevention.
Where House of Viridian is not a framework but a table, not an analysis but a meal, not a system but an invitation. Pull up a chair.