Our first workshop delivered at RWTH Aachen University in Germany, as part of the 4th Politics of the Machines conference in April 2024.

Facilitated by our founder Rayyan, this workshop helped participants understand the evolution of their relationship to their own hobbies. Why did they ignore them for long periods of time, only to eventually return to them? What role was their Narcissism and Unconscious playing in that evolution? Participants mapped out this deeper relationship to themselves and their hobbies through curves and historical timelines. They were exposed to digestible snippets of the works of George Sand, Lou Andreas-Salomé, and Hannah Arendt, 

Participants reported being surprised by the format of the workshop and the attention paid to deeper processes of human experience. They found it refreshing that the worksheets did not ask them questions for which they already knew the answer. They took every minute of the moment given to them to reflect on their own and they liked the fact that no personal selfish fact was embarrassing since the premise was that narcissism existed in everyone. One participant in particular reported enjoying recalling parts of their past they haven’t had time to think about.