Introducing Simon Hertnon

Simon Hertnon

A photo of Simon Hertnon reviewing a document

My passion

While my joys are manifold, including learning and teaching and storytelling, my single underlying passion is to help enough of us to team up so we can expediently change the course of human civilisation.

Heady stuff, yeah? Tell me about it!

Living the life of a globetrotting author was my dream, but our need for societal transformation has grown throughout my life, as has my calling to try to do something about it.

I don’t believe humanity is on a mission to ruin life on earth, but I recognise that’s what our collective actions are doing.

Importantly, I don’t believe we are a lost cause.

I can see we are intensely occupied following a flawed societal success story – the incessant pursuit of more and more individual wealth, possessions, and status – and that this story is the upstream source of our collective existential mess.

True, we have been occupied by the always-seek-more story for so long that it feels like an immutable law we cannot challenge or change. But it isn’t. We can write a new story. We can change our way of living. We can change all our prospects.

By my decades-long reckoning, changing our success story will require an intervention of simplicity. A call to action that is so simple it breaks through the busyness and noise to reveal the simple, practical options available to us.

This is why I have dedicated so many years of voluntary toil to discern what is now summarised as the Same Page Manifesto.

Please, if you care about our collective future, check it out.

We need to team up now.

My qualifications and experience

I have been writing professionally since completing a BA in Linguistics from Victoria University of Wellington in 1989.

In addition to the publications listed on the books page, I have written dozens of newspaper and magazine columns and articles, and have published one novel, The Julian Calendar (as William Henry).

Through my consulting and teaching work for my company Nakedize, and through previous businesses (including an inbound travel agency, a web design agency, and an online retailer), I have worked on hundreds of projects and thousands of documents.

I have been an Associate of Victoria University of Wellington since 2008, and have served on the judging panel of the New Zealand Plain Language Awards since 2011 (including, since 2023, as head judge). From 2014 to 2022, I also served as a founding member of the National Consumer Council (formerly Consumer Advisory Group) for Southern Cross Healthcare Limited.

Earlier in my career, I worked as a freelance photojournalist and proofreader. I was also fortunate to receive professional storytelling and scriptwriting training from South Pacific Pictures.

My interests and pastimes

In addition to my passion for philosophy, I have a keen interest in human needs, history, anthropology, conflict resolution, natural design, and all the storytelling arts. Not surprisingly, I love to travel.

I also enjoy movies, the outdoors, running, cycling, music, reading, cooking, and (rather to my surprise) handyman stuff.

My online presence