THE GUY BEHIND HOW TO MENSCH.
My name is Carsten Haverkamp.
I’ve spent many years working with technical systems. With industrial plants, control systems, interfaces, and the very practical question of why something doesn’t work the way it is supposed to.
At some point, I noticed that surprisingly similar questions kept coming up for me outside the world of technology.
Why do people do things even though they know they aren’t good for them? Why do conversations break down between two people who both believe they are being completely reasonable? Why do societies hold on to structures whose problems have been obvious for years? And why can we know so much about certain things for decades without that knowledge automatically changing the way we act?
That’s where HOW TO MENSCH came from.
Not from the idea of telling people how they are supposed to function. There is already enough of that. I’m more interested in what happens when you put things next to each other that are usually kept separate: perception and technology. Relationships and society. Biography and the present. Metal and humanity. Sometimes, placing two familiar things next to each other creates a question that wasn’t there before.
I also play guitar, write books, and apparently have a habit of looking at things for longer than is strictly necessary for an ordinary evening after work.
HOW TO MENSCH is one of the things that came out of that.
Or at least one of them.