It happened at the Kaleidoscope festival in 2019. I had recently returned from South America, found a job in Berlin, and had a completely free summer ahead. During six months of wandering around South America, I learned to make earrings out of wire. Over there, it’s a whole lifestyle: traveling across the continent, earning a living by selling handmade jewelry. They use plant seeds, parrot feathers, minerals, and even fish scales, which can be bought cheaply in the Peruvian jungle and later sold at a higher price at a market in Buenos Aires.

Of course, I wanted to try the role of a wandering artisan myself. Back in Peru, I bought nearly 4 kilograms of wire, carried it in my backpack all the way to Cape Horn, and brought it back to Kyiv. For the festival, I decided to go as a mysterious traveler who makes extraordinarily beautiful earrings from exotic materials. Okay, I didn’t have phoenix feathers, but I did have scales from the largest freshwater fish in the world!

The idea came to me three days before the festival. I was twisting wire for 10 hours a day to at least somewhat prepare, to make something unusual. So people at the festival would notice those damned earrings, and then me, so they’d become interested, start asking questions… and that’s when I’d reveal my rich inner world to them.

Yeah, right.

Another person stops by the stand; you keep twisting the wire with feigned indifference, but inside, you freeze, waiting for them to say something. But they leave. Maybe they’ll say how beautiful the earrings are—and leave. Maybe they’ll ask how much these cost? You name a low price on the spot, the person might buy them—and leave.

I quickly became filled with loneliness. What did you expect, going alone? Is it really that hard to meet someone at a festival? Welcome to the world of Projectors…

But waiting doesn’t last forever. On the second day, I connected with my neighbor in the trading row. She sold incense sticks and painted children’s faces. Nothing special, but it felt so good just to talk to someone who found you interesting.

We discussed the lecture program and, I think, agreed that everything was futile, but we could check out what this “Human Design” thing was about. And the timing worked out so that just as we had started talking, and I wasn’t lonely for the first time in two days, the Human Design lecture was already underway. I didn’t want to go to it; I wanted to keep talking. But the girl literally pushed me to go. “Go now,” she said.

So I went…

I caught the last 30 minutes of Yana and Dima’s lecture on the Human Design system. I barely remember what they were talking about, but it was something standard: types, strategy, mechanics. There was definitely a metaphor about a car and its passenger.

It sounded like nonsense, especially the use of analogies as arguments—like, you don’t interfere with a taxi driver, so you should trust the Monopole. Flawless logic, right? Their presentation style annoyed me; it felt like I was listening to a pastor in a church somewhere in the Louisiana swamps. I was filled with indignation. I only endured to the end to ask questions.

There are no Jehovah’s Witnesses in my neighborhood, so the chance to talk to people who seriously believe in pseudoscientific typologies was a gift.

I give credit to the speakers for their patience; they calmly tried to answer all the questions. By the time we got to neutrino streams, there were only three of us left. At that point, Yana came up with a hypothesis about me, which she shared with Dima quietly. They entered my data into their phone, and her hypothesis was confirmed. That allowed the conversation to continue because I was already starting to get bored.

Dima looked at the screen and quickly gave me 3-4 points about myself. And they were really about me. I immediately related to everything he said, except one thing—digging into the past. At the time, I just didn’t understand what he meant. Digging into the past is indeed a trait of mine, as this story took place in June 2019, and I’m writing about it in November 2021.

The accuracy of the insights, casually shared in 5 minutes, was impressive. And I decided to figure out what this “Human Design” was all about. Remember, I had a completely free summer ahead…

There’s enough information about Human Design online to start exploring on your own. Even at a surface level, it was a “Wow!” The system explained me better than anything I’d encountered before.

The highlighted aspects were too un-horoscope-like to be ignored. It felt like you’d finally received your Hogwarts letter. But instead of a list of textbooks, it included a link to the source code of the universe.

It was so cool that it couldn’t possibly be real. Naturally, I started looking for the trick, trying to break the system, to understand the trick it played on the mind of someone who’s read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality four times, for that matter.

Two and a half years later, after studying and applying it in practice, I’m still trying to break it. No luck so far. But I’m happy because I feel like I’ve found something to keep myself occupied for the rest of my life.