Thomas Brunner

About

My own “about” page. A chance to say everything I feel needs to be said about myself in order to make sense of me as a person (I, too, shall learn something here). Turning my inner workings inside out, making me transparent even to myself so that we all get to look into one ever-changing human puzzle. And nobody can interrupt me. Such power. Such freedom.

Story of my life

I am a big fan of good stories, and what is life if not a story? I am always intersted to hear about other people’s lives, about their backgrounds, their struggles, their beliefs, their goals - in short, how they have become the person they are today and who and what shaped them along the way. To live up to my own expectations, I will try to give as thorough an insight into my life as anyone might care for.

Vegetarianism

I have been a vegetarian ever since 2013, eating vegan on most days. Having grown up in a meat-first country, culture and family, it started out as an experiment to see whether I could actually live life without consuming any meat (I know…), but a few weeks in I felt more awake, healthier and overall cleaner, and realised how foolish it was not to consider it much sooner and that I was placing my own uninformed dietary preferences (or, rather, what was the cultural norm) above the well-being of other living beings, which as far as I know didn’t ask to be born, just like the rest of us. By all accounts, our friend Pythagoras practised and preached a vegetarian (if not vegan) diet more than 2,000 years ago.

Minimalism

Owning too many things has dragged me down ever since my teens (I was a spoiled child, and giving stuff was part of the love language palette I experienced), but it took me some time to realise I can actually do something about it. Too much of anything strips away the joy of everything. Whenever I notice I own something I don’t actively use, it goes. Whenever I notice somebody isn’t doing me any good consistently, I go :) While my minimalism journey started in the material world, I have since expanded my application of it to the entire spectrum of life and try to reduce noise in everything I do, and to be very critical and mindful about what I consume and how I spend my time.

Stoicism

When I was reading Störig’s Kleine Weltgeschichte der Philosophie to get an introduction into the history of philosophy and read about stoicism, I was struck by the highly pragmatic and applicable wisdom that it conveyed. Wanting to learn more about stoicism, I read the classics of Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus and was absolutely blown away by the sheer conciseness and precision with which they were able to express their thoughts, but also by the impact those insights had in my everyday life. If you have never heard of stoicism or about its three main thinkers, do yourself a favour and change that - you will come out wiser and calmer.

Mindfulness

Always having been drawn to buddhism and being blessed with the joyous ability to experience stress rather intensely, it was only a matter of time until I would come across mindfulness. To get started, I did the eight-week programme described in Mindfulness: A practical guide to finding peace in a frantic world, and was absolutely amazed when I realised how much power my own thoughts have had over me for over 20 years and when I experienced the peace and oneness that listening to your own breath brings about.

About the site

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