Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

All You (Probably) Need Is Discipline

I know, I do.

I was born into the prosperity of cold-war era Austria. This sounds dramatic and to some extent it was. Tschernobyl hadn’t happened yet and Germany was still divided. We couldn’t cross over to hungary that easily and we’d still have to show our passports when crossing borders in general. Still, for us middle-class kids, life was good. Even after Tschernobyl went down and we weren’t allowed to eat mushrooms anymore, or sand, we had a great time.

My parents raised me to be curious, with very little rules except the ones that kept me safe from injuring myself through my own stupidity. I grew up to be a rebellious kid and challenge authority very often. Not to create a ruckus, not to break any rules. But to get answers. I was raised by getting answers to all my questions. Never once my parents said “It’s like this because we tell you so.”. If I asked why the sky is blue, they made sure to dig up a book (way before the Internet) and tell me exactly about air, what it was made of and why it scatters the blue wavelengths of visible light more when stacked up high enough. They did their best to feed my hunger for knowledge.

So. I grew up “free” in every sense of the word. Free to express myself in any way and form. Free to say “no” to my teachers when I felt pressured into climbing a wall in physical education…