Peeling Potatoes 24: Level Up, Settle Down, and the Mystery Box of Life

It’s barely light where Frank is—Cleebourg mornings come on grey and slow—and yet the conversation clicks on like a lamp in a kitchen. “And we are live,” he says, twice for luck, while Fruitloop (Janita) laughs on the other end of the line. Between them lies a continent, a generation, and a shared project of seeing the ordinary with extraordinary care. This episode of Peeling Potatoes begins not with a thesis, but with tape hiss: mixtapes, morning runs, man-flu, and the art of asking good questions without knowing what will land. It’s “Skills Month” at Brida, and the pair are playing an intergenerational game—ten questions each, drawn blind, answered in full voice. The rules are simple; the outcomes, deliciously human.

The scene, the stakes, the spark

Their office is a “coffee tin,” their drive is a “fruit bowl,” their archive a compost heap of ideas: playfully named, deeply lived. What begins as banter—“I’ve been up since 5:30,” “I thought you’d cancel,” “I had to share my idea”—becomes a declaration of method. The method is: show up. Early if you must. Curious if you can. Ready to be surprised.

Frank and Janita never swapped questions in advance. She picks 3; he picks 5; and the conversation slides into something that sounds like home. “Which taught you more about relationships—mixtapes or memes?” Frank asks. “Mixtapes,” says Fruitloop, without blinking. She remembers the walkman she still owns, the DJ speaking over the best bars, the serious business of catching a song in real time. Frank grins; he did the same thing in Adelaide—long nights, FM radio, fingers poised on “record.”

Takeaway: Rituals teach us the texture of attention. What have your mixtapes—analog or digital—taught you about love?

Curiosity, craft, and the quiet engine of resilience

Janita flips the game. “When life threw curveballs, who picked you up: friends, family, faith, or stubbornness?” Frank does the arithmetic of memory—1961, 1996, a difficult period—then answers with the honesty that turns a conversation into a mirror. “Stubbornness,” he says. Only child, few local friends, reverse migration from Australia to Germany, and the cultivated ability to be comfortable with his own company. Reflection as a survival skill. “I am probably my own stubborn helper.”

It isn’t isolation, it’s agency. He listens to others—he will always seek his family’s counsel—but the final draft is written in the quiet of his own thinking. He says he’d “fight tooth and nail” for Brida because it was built from nothing and deserves the everything that follow-through demands. Janita nods. There’s both tenderness and steel in the exchange: tenderness for the work, steel for the storms.

Takeaway: Self-reliance is not refusal; it’s authorship. Where do you still outsource decisions you could lovingly own?

Routines, resets, and the art of slowing down

“How do you slow down when everything speeds up?” he asks. “Two things,” Janita replies. “Reading and music.” She describes a reading app that unlocks a new chapter every six hours—built-in scarcity as a gift to attention. Frank lights up: perhaps this is the trick for a brain that outruns books even in a home stuffed with them. (He has a library. His mother has half a room more. And yet: so many spines, so few margins.)

It’s a modern paradox: abundance makes choosing feel like loss. The six-hour gate makes reading feel like a promise—you’ll be back. Music works on both of them like a reset button. Earbuds in, eyes closed, the world goes temporarily soft-focus. And then the routine returns: he steps out of the noisy home office because “it’s quieter outside.” She anchors her reading to the edges of the day—before school drop-off, after bedtime—protecting concentration from the pinball of domestic life.

Takeaway: Ask of every good habit: When does it fit me best? Then cordon off those minutes like you would an heirloom.

The mystery box: shake, open, or decorate?

“Decorate,” Janita says, delighted. The metaphor becomes a training plan. Her mystery box is a 5K Color Run on November 29. She doesn’t love running—“I run only when I’m running from something,” she jokes—but she loves outside. So she reframes the task: mornings, fresh air, new streets, rain or shine, a month to build towards five kilometres and a future of Saturday park runs. She’s seven days in when they speak; by the time you read this, she’ll have added many more dawns to her ledger.

Frank watches with the proud impatience of a person who knows what a decision can do. “Mindset,” he says finally—the word she hadn’t said yet but was already practicing. She remembers cycling races in rain, wind, scorching sun. At some point you stop scanning the weather and start scanning yourself: do I want what this choice makes me become?

Takeaway: Motivation is a mood; commitment is a calendar entry. What will you “decorate” so that the work keeps inviting you back?

The big lens: adulting then, adulting now

“When you were my age,” Janita asks, “what did adulting look like? Is my generation making it look harder—or just louder?” Frank exhales into 1996—divorce proceedings, commuting to Frankfurt, a dawn-tinged internet (AOL, CompuServe), the beginning of the work he now can’t imagine not doing. “Louder,” he answers, but with a context that refuses caricature. His generation laid foundations—environmental awareness in the ’80s, the rise of Green politics—and the next generation inherited a library of choice with no index to navigate it.

He would not want to be thirty-something now, he confesses, not because he’s anti-future but because he respects its complexity. He and his mother still talk about security—hers is institutional, his is entrepreneurial (“the lack of security becomes security because you stay on the ball”), Janita’s is distributed across multiple incomes and a dynamic home front. The game here isn’t judgment, it’s translation. “Your generation is radical differently,” he says. “Not worse—different. We gave you breadth. We didn’t give you an instruction manual.”

Janita sketches her childhood in South Africa: early mornings, one income, dinner at a table, naps on weekends, cartoons from 3 to 5, play that smelled like fresh-cut grass. The simplicity reads now like a luxury. She’s not sentimental about it; she’s honest. “They made it look easy,” she says. “Now it is harder.” Routines survive in bedtimes and school runs; the rest is jazz—who cooks, when we eat, how we fit work inside a life that doesn’t stop to ask our permission.

Takeaway: If your parents’ order was built on fewer inputs, your order will be built on sharper filters. Which one do you need to tune today: the intake, or the boundaries?

Level up or settle down?

“If the next generation asked what it means to grow up,” Frank asks, “would you tell them to settle down or level up?” Yanita doesn’t blink: “Level up.” She unfurls a list that sounds like a pep talk and a practice—be strong, be fit, make healthy choices, choose wisely, stay focused, stay positive. “All hands and arms inside the seat—but go for it.” Frank agrees, with one footnote borrowed from Casey Kasem: keep your feet on the ground while you reach for the stars. Solid foundations. Big sky.

And then the beautiful, difficult sentence that hangs like a lantern over the whole episode: “It has become impossible to live on one income as an ordinary person.” This isn’t defeatism; it’s design constraints. The modern household is a portfolio, not a single stock. There’s risk, but there’s also a kind of creative resilience that old models didn’t require.

Takeaway: Your “grown-up” setting is a dial, not a switch. What one notch toward ground—and one notch toward sky—could you adjust this week?

The old-school skill we forgot to teach

“What one old-school skill would you give my generation to survive the modern circus?” Janita asks. Frank answers with a word so simple it risks invisibility: respect. Respect for elders who did their best with what they had. Respect for peers whose maps differ from yours. Respect for younger voices who will inherit both our solutions and our mistakes. He refuses to sanitize history—he speaks of German memory and the refusal to forget what the Nazi regime did; he speaks of statues torn down and the question of whether some should remain as reminders. “We can be critical,” he says, “and put everything in context.”

Respect, in his telling, becomes a multi-tool: it opens difficult conversations without dulling the blade of truth. It invites perspective-taking without surrendering convictions. “You may disagree,” he says, “and then you agree to disagree—but at least you know where that person is coming from.”

Janita answers with an echo pitched to daily life: smart shopping. Skills that protect budgets and nourish dinners. The green grocer two kilometers away has apples at half the price of the supermarket. She won’t drive 40 kilometers for milk on sale, but she will know the micro-economy of her neighborhood. Frank laughs at the symmetry: his high philosophy, her high practicality—and how both are needed for a week to hold together.

Takeaway: Ideals set the direction; errands set the pace. Which “respect” do you owe today—to history, to a neighbor, or to your grocery list?

The soft ending that keeps the conversation open

The episode ends where good conversations always end: with warmth and a next time. Fingers crossed for the Color Run. A request for progress photos. A promise to keep turning up and turning over the potatoes of everyday life until their skins come loose and their stories come out. They both know what September and October felt like—chaos, backlog, the weird energy of modern living—and both know what to do next: build a routine robust enough to hold the surprises, and a curiosity strong enough to decorate the mystery box.

Frank doesn’t say it outright, but the subtext is clear: create your own summer. If the outer weather refuses, cultivate the inner climate—through music, a chapter every six hours, a run before sunrise, a respectful debate, a budget that names what you value. The season you’re in won’t last. That is the warning and the gift.

What can I take from this? Start with one thing you can stubbornly own this week. One respectful conversation you can begin. One routine you can defend. Then level up—quietly, consistently—until the next live button clicks, and you find yourself ready for another ten questions you haven’t seen yet.

Your turn: What season are you in—harvest, wintering, early spring? Name it. Then choose one small, stubborn habit that will help you create your own summer, right where you are.