Embrace the Weird | Weekstarter 42-2025

Intro

I have a busier than usual week ahead of me and its start was a perfect encapsulation of that. I’m not complaining but just wanted to let you know that’s why I’m making the finishing touches to this post around 18:30.

Greetings from Sangarius. Hope you’re all doing well.

Mission Control

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Heading İstanbul on Thursday to give an AI workshop for journalists and NGOs. Which means I need to give the workshop its final shape as soon as possible.Working on another workshop that’s going to happen in the coming weeks.Working on an project idea for Tuhaf Gelecek.Hoping to put some time aside to write couple of ideas I had to see where they’re going.Also started to play around with micro.blog to see if I can make a POSSE turn on my social media use.

Check my Now page to see what else is going on.

Embrace the Weird

I have been working through an idea for a while before turning it into a proper blog post/article/manifesto/etc. but after reading Jay’s blog post from last week, I wanted to work on that idea by writing about it here. (Because one thing I’m really bad at is that I always want to perfect everything before putting it out there and that’s why I have dozens of drafts and big gaps in my blog.)

Keep in mind this is just a brain dump version of the idea, which I’m planning to turn into a proper piece.

Let’s start with a quote from Jay:

“Every single day right now it seems like I’m waking up in the morning to some new piece of bullshit. Some new AI thing, some new crypto thing happening, some new insane crypto AND AI thing, politics is mad, war is happening and only going to get worse every where, a genocide is playing out in full view of the world, biosphere collapse, the news of AMOK collapse risk, there is no end to the horrors.

The sea is so very big and my boat is so very small.

But what a time to be alive, to be living through all of this, inside the churn.”

The Voltage Of The Age – Jay Springett

This is a feeling I have regularly and enjoy a lot. Maybe it’s because growing up in Turkey or my brain is wired differently but seeing all the madness, observing and thinking about it is something I find enjoyable. Not because I think it’s all good but any other option I have against this madness feels boring and meaningless to me.

I made peace with the fact that we’re living in a messy world full of ambiguity, uncertainty, chaos, and weirdness. You may try to make sense of it by making up clear cut models of it but you’ll always get frustrated by the world not fitting to those models. You can go with the route of romanticizing the past, a culture or being human but this will only give you a momentary relief — or drive you into a dangerous path.

Or, you can go with what I call “embracing the weird”. Instead of wasting your energy by trying to make the world a static and safe place, you can embrace all of its weirdness and learn from it. Instead of fighting against the uncertainty, you can work with it. Because no matter how hard you try, world insists on being a weird and deadly interesting place. (And now you know where the name of my blog comes from.)

I know what I’m offering doesn’t sound like a good idea for many people because admitting that world will never be a completely safe place is not a comforting thought. This is why people are drawn to ideas and ideologies which hides all of the messy parts of the world under the rug and tells them a comforting story. When you look at most of the problems we face today, you’ll find those stories either causing them or making them worse.

(This is also why I don’t really care about social media anymore because almost everyone there expects others to comfort them or finds comfort in fighting with the people who makes them uncomfortable.)

That’s why I believe more people should embrace the weird if they want to really understand and enjoy the world we live in — and spend more time with the ones who are not afraid of the beautiful weirdness of the world. Every other option I mentioned above feels like wasting our time.

Song of the Week

Really excited about where the new Gorillaz album is going.

Reading Log

“We’ve just forgotten that the future is supposed to BE weird and wonderful. We’re supposed to build that.”

CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis – Warren Ellis

“In other words, an agency is being ascribed to this thing we call “technology”; we have assigned it a capacity to act and to influence the circumstances. In doing so, we have tacitly surrendered or disavowed our own agency, to a lesser or greater degree.”

week 41 / 2025: stuck in the middle with you – Paul Graham Raven

Outro

And that’s a wrap for this week. I want to go deeper with “Embrace the Weird” concept so I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Send me your comments, recommendations, ramblings and love/hate letters however you want.

See you next week!

If you want to work together to make sense of what's ahead, Tuhaf Studio is open for new clients. You can also get in touch with London Speaker Bureau Türkiye if you want to hire me as a speaker or panelist. If you want to become a regular supporter of my public work and help me create more, you can visit my Patreon. Thanks!