"Bostrom has a reinvented man’s sense of lost time.
An only child, he grew up—as Niklas Boström—in
Helsingborg, on the southern coast of Sweden.
Like many exceptionally bright children, he hated
school, and as a teen-ager he developed a listless,
romantic persona. In 1989, he wandered into a library
and stumbled onto an anthology of nineteenth-century
German philosophy, containing works by Nietzsche
and Schopenhauer. He read it in a nearby forest, in
a clearing that he often visited to think and to write
poetry, and experienced a euphoric insight into the
possibilities of learning and achievement. 'It’s hard to
convey in words what that was like,' Bostrom told me…."
— Raffi Khatchadourian
