Unix philosophy to my daily life
January 2026
This is a personal article for me. I will explain what I’ve seen so far with society and then I will reflect about Unix, the C programming language, BSDs, etc..
Unix is, mmm, trascendental. It represents a hole new way of life and still does it, even though it was built a long time ago by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and a group of devs back in the day at Bell Labs. It was a different time, social media was unexistent, people had to be more patient on whatever they wanted to do, personal computers were so expensive and rare. There was no time to hurry to get a 9-4 job at a big tech company to get some external approval and validation. There was no tinder, no bumble, no rush to get a boyfriend/girlfriend or no social pressure to get one. There was no comparison between couples. There was no fast content. There was no smartphones, that tiny computer that makes people surrender their freedom in exchange of some likes and some dopamine 24/7. Tiktok, instagram, fb, those things were unexistent back in the day. Things were durable, those things were built to last forever. Now modern society is embracing a whole new complex world that puts people’s freedom behind a subscription paywall and a beautiful garden. To make sure someone doesn’t excape from prision is to ensure he doesn’t think he is one
If you wanted to build smth, you just had a 150-200 page manual and some luck. There was even no IRC at that time when Unix V5 was released. Complex systems like Windows 11, filled with ads, doomscrolling content and automatized tasks are making people to think less and trust more. Windows 11, with that recall thing, people are not aware of the mental impact of this. People are developing a dependant mindset, they rely on what big corporations say about them. Tiktok now embraces a new form so stylish and I bet everyone is gonna follow that tendency.
Kids nowadays don’t wanna pursue their dreams. Tiktok fills that dream for them. Brainrots, trash viral content, internet drama, toxic relationships, infidelities caused by external stimuli, anxiety caused by someone who was ghosted, tendencies, trashy marketing.
Unix was built when this modern drama was unexistent. You just had a PDP-11 computer with some Black Sabbath’s songs in the background. THere was no internet drama, no digital subscriptions, everything was yours. Awk was not built to impress people and get external validation; it was built because it was (and is) necessary. An FHS, IEEE standards like POSIX, sed, mkdir, more, sleep, ln, df, du, echo, netstat, everything was built because it was and is necessary, pure coherence.
Coherence, purpose, minimalism. Minimalism, the FHS has only 9 main subdirectories that are /bin -> /usr/bin, /sys, /proc, /etc, /dev, /lib, /sbin, /usr, /var, each one with its main purpose. The filesystem organizes data as well as I organize my mind. Minimalism as a way of life
Unix as a sole operating system has 3 main components, no more, no less: the kernel, the shell and the userland utilities. No more, no less. It was not built for people who want something digerible, was built for those few people who want to understand the “why”
Unix was built for real hackers, real people that don’t settle with the basic stuff. Hollywood brainwashed people’s minds on what a hacker is. Social drama and movies brainwashed on what real hackers do. Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan, they are real hackers. Hackers made the TCP/IP scheme, the OSI model, they built ARPANET and internet, IEEE and RFC standards, they built the definition of sockets, wrappers, I/0 redirection, pipelines and most everything that society takes for granted. They were and are solitude people. I am as well.
Unix was not meant and is not meant for everyone, but just for those who are willing to understand it as a way of life. Minimalism embraces solitude and solitude embraces freedom. Unix doesn’t want you to cheer it, it wants you to understand it and most of the modern society are not willing to understand basic stuff but to get everything done by some random AI agent in their OSses and most of their daily lives.
Why most universities teach people to be employees at a big tech corporation with executives and CEOs instead of building an own self-path? Is it because external validation? Is it because parties get more socialrecognition than building a Debian package at a friday at 11 pm with completely solitude? Interesting here then. Modern universities are producing big successful employees in exchange of freedom.
Back in the day, if you wanted to write your stuff, you had to code your own text editor. A C64 had nothing but a blue prompt with that famous “** Commodore 64 Basic v2 **, 64k Ram system 38911 basic bytes free, Ready”. Nothing more, nothing less. You needed to think what to build in the first place.
Going against the tide with this is that I accept and will accept solitude and nights of crying and asking myself “why I am doing this in the first place?” in exchange of freedom, and so do u. Start thinking more, start embracing minimalism, start embracing solitude, embracing a new self way of life.
Embrace freedom, embrace coherence over modernity, over fast stuff, over fast money, over lack of purpose, over quick and empty relationships (friendly and romantic), over luxury and greed
Be silent. Be consistent. Nobody knows what BSD (the Berkeley Software Distribution) is and even though it sustains the entire world. Linux was in part a silent revolution of a quick standardized dopamine caused by corporations, governments and people as well. Be silent, don’t cheer things, embrace them. Real hackers don’t cheer things, they embrace them, they change the play, we change the play. We help this world to be sustained by smth, but in silent.
Embrace freedom. I embrace being different even though nobody or just a few people want to stay aside me. I got used to people getting away from me and I was being rejected so many times by girls and people in general so nothing scares me when it comes to people. Nothing should scare you.
Embrace knowledge, embrace learning stuff. Embrace eternity, embrace being different.
I cannot control the wind but I can control my sails.
I love myself.