The Paper-Thesis Carbon Analogy

I've recently compared the difference between writing a paper and a thesis to the manipulation of carbon. A paper is like a diamond that has gone through many iterations to be as compact and perfectly structured as possible, a shiny thing. Trying to spread that paper out in a thesis is like picking up the diamond you've spent so many hours on and trying to make graphite out of it. An ugly process you don't really want to go through. Sure, you'll try to make a beautiful enamelled pencil out of it, but it's not as shiny as the paper!

Temporary Life

I live most of my days enjoying the small things in life and being proud about how far I have come and happy about what and who I have around me. Today is not one of those days. Today I am too aware that I am twenty five years old, yet I live life from temporary stage to temporary stage. Not to say that I want to have a routine, far from it, I can't handle routine, but it would be nice to have some more permanent things in life. In order to follow my dream I had to move out of my country and that's where my temporary life began.

I moved to England four and a half years ago, to start a degree that would hopefully jump-start my career, the dream career that I wanted for myself. I never thought I'd call that place home, but after four years it grew big in my heart. However, I've always seen my life there as a temporary thing. You might find that normal when you're in university, but not knowing where I would be next made me cautious about how I'd spent my money. Because of that, I feel like I've only lived half of what I could have lived. Maybe it's just my anxiety talking here, but whenever I wanted something for myself, I would always think about the money I should save for the uncertain future. I missed a lot of travelling opportunities because I didn't know enough about my future to know if I could spare a few quid, or because I didn't know if I would need to be somewhere else at that point in the future. Similarly, I never got a car like I wanted because I didn't want it to be a waste of money in case I had to move out of England. I know this comes from a privileged point of view and like I said I am grateful for all I have most days, but the mind just works in irrational ways sometimes and there's no point telling it "don't be sad, look at everything you have". It's all about perspective, and today's perspective gives a sad contrast to my life.

I eventually finished my stay in the north of England and moved to the lovely city of Cambridge, after four years. Things are much better here. The weather is better, the city is more lively, people seem friendlier and everything just seems a lot more pleasant and beautiful, definitely more colourful. It's still not where I want to settle. The weather is still not optimal, it's still not close to the sea, there's still not a lot of activities to be done when compared to other places and the salary is still not enough for everything I want. One of the things I want is to be able to travel a lot more, which requires money and time, and although I can afford to travel to countries in Europe, I still require the time and weekends doesn't feel like enough. In other words, having a nine to five job takes up most of the time in your life, so I can't even imagine people who struggle with more than a job or with crazy shifts and schedules and workload. It seems like we're not allowed to enjoy life and we are forced to try and find a job doing what we love. I count myself as one of the rare lucky people who are doing what they love, which is truly a privilege, but work is still work and even though I have fun at my job and it keeps me motivated, I still feel quite stuck. It's not hard to understand this, just imagine you love playing guitar: You may feel good doing it for four straight hours, but you eventually stop and go do something else, right? Even if you love doing something, it doesn't mean you won't get bored after some hours doing it, or even feel like you don't really want to do it today. Don't get me wrong, this is a hundred times better than having a job you don't particularly like or a job you hate, but wouldn't it be better if you could just do what you want when you wanted? Maybe a lot of people won't feel this way, they like to have the responsibility and purpose that a job gives. I'm not one of those people.

That said, I feel like my time in Cambridge is temporary. Yes, we are back on topic. Even though I found a job in a company that wants me with a manager that likes me, where I can grow quickly and get far, I still feel it's temporary. I don't want to live in Cambridge, as beautiful as it is. It's still not the sunny place by the sea that I want to settle in. And my ambition pairs up with this need to do break out of the routine job and makes me want to create a successful startup. However, I'm a person that always plays safe and I don't like risk when it comes to my career. Even though I keep my options open and future uncertain, I have a big safety net and my career choices are very solid in order to minimise the possibility of failure. This is why creating a startup is so scary for me and I would only do it after researching enough to know that it would most probably lead to success. I'll always have that startup idea in my mind, because it seems to be one of the only ways to achieve a life where you have a lot of free time to do what you like. That said, I plan to stay at most three years here and then move to sunny California, where the weather is great and there are a lot of things to do, including surf. Because of that, I only half live my life here. I wanted to buy a car to keep for myself, one that I like, but because my stay in England is temporary, I am required to buy a more temporary solution. I also want to live closer to the centre and with friends, so I can easily go for walks and enjoy how alive the city is and to be able to have people I love when I get back from work, but this would become more expensive monthly, once again making me consider a cheaper solution temporarily. A piano would certainly be a wonderful thing to have, but once again I know that even if I bought one, I would end up selling it, and once again it hinders my economy. In conclusion, my stay in Cambridge is once again temporary, for the next three years, at least.

But in three years I will be twenty eight and my energy will start to decline towards middle age. If I finally manage to find a place where I want to settle by then, I can finally start investing and saving for the car I want, the house, the piano, and everything else. And those are the prospects for someone as highly privileged as me. Most people will never even get there, or get there later in life, when they've lost all the energy needed to enjoy it. Have you noticed then? We're living a temporary life for most of our youngest years, not fully enjoying everything because we want a secured future. We're always carefully counting our money and time in order to achieve a future where our money and time will allow us to do what we love when we want to. And most of us will never even get there. Most of us will lead a temporary life forever.

At this point there's always those who will say "enjoy what you have" and "take pleasure from the small things in life". But while some people might be able to live happily with nothing, others might not be so free. Others, like myself, will feel trapped in their temporary lives, always expecting a better future. I truly hope you are not one of us, but if you are, I hope this post gave you a little more comfort by knowing there's someone else out there like you.

Carpe Diem

We are mortal so that we can enjoy life. We get sad so that we can understand happiness. We make mistakes so that we can learn from them. There is no better time to be happy than now, don't spend your lives waiting for the perfect moment to be happy. Don't wait until you have that car, or that job, or live in that place, because there will always be some other achievement after that and you will never be happy. Instead, enjoy every bit of today, reminisce every bit of yesterday and get excited about tomorrow!

Boundaries of Knowledge

When you're at the end of a PhD, you will have all these improvements and solutions that you could easily do yourself, but you know that you can't possible do them all in time. That's when you know it's time to start writing. That's when you start to lay down the foundation of your research for others to come and resume it. You write about the things you could have done if you had more time in hopes that others after you will seek to complete them by reading your theoretical solutions. Nonetheless, you still feel like you weren't completely successful. This is definitely one of the most interesting journeys of my life: the journey to the edge of the world, pushing at the very boundaries of knowledge only to understand that what lies ahead is so infinite you can't possibly reach it. That feeling of not being successful at the end of a PhD is just the human thirst for knowledge and perfection and it is what makes us advance in science and technology.

What if the mirror talked back?

What if the mirror talked back at you? No, not in a horror movie kind of way. All of us have probably wondered what it would be to be talking to a replica of ourselves. After all, we all seek people who understand us and who would better understand us than ourselves? Imagine how many hours you would spend talking to each other, about everything, every opinion you have, every passion. It would be an amazing experience, but it would also creep you out if someone you met was ever that similar to you, because you would not believe it possible. Maybe you would obsess about finding a flaw, a disagreement, something to break the spell! Or you would try to exhaust all possible topics, as fast as you can, because you know your life has a time limit and you would never be able to exchange all the thoughts and opinions you want. If you ever met such person, you would not care what kind of label is attributed to your relation, because all that matters is the connection between you both, which is beyond sight and physicality. And imagine how much you could learn by talking to yourself! Imagine how much you could improve yourself. That is, after all, the principle behind introspection and self-reflection. If you ever met that person, what would you do? How would you feel? An immeasurable sense of joy and happiness? Would you let yourself be consumed by this person?

Just some food for thought :)

Her

This is my interpretation of the movie and thus contains spoilers. You're welcome to read and comment but bear in mind it's only an interpretation that may differ from yours.

"Her" deserves a review as big as its name: "Wow". For no amount of words would help me describe what I felt watching this movie. However, I'm certainly going to try, since it has inspired me!

The movie clearly speaks to us about our technologically advancing society, where people are more and more digitalized. It may look like we're more connected than we ever were, and the movie starts with a glimpse at that exact past when we were still writing hand-written letters to each other, when it was harder to remain connected. A lover couldn't almost instantly receive an "I love you" from the other half, a father couldn't almost instantly receive news of his son's success, a friend couldn't almost instantly share an amazing view with his friend in the other side of the world. Yes, we are more easily connected, but we are also disconnecting from the real physical world. More and more people look at their phones instead of looking around, talk through their phones instead of simply through centimeters of air. This movie shows us a very possible future where everyone is speaking to their phones on the streets, on the tube and even on the bars. It's not really that far into the future though, who doesn't pick up their phones to write messages when they're in the middle of a social situation, nowadays?

Then there's the controversial plot of a man falling in love with an artificial inteligence. But even that isn't as farfetched as it sounds. People everywhere talk more and more through the internet with people they love, even if they fell in love in the "real world". So once again the movie starts slowly by showing us the next step: someone else writing those messages for you and for the person messaging you back. Not just that, but more and more people are creating bonds with each other over the internet, without ever meeting physically. Making friends over the internet isn't really rare, and neither is falling in love, at least up to a certain point. This means the lack of a physical representation isn't as essential. So what if the person on the other side of the line wasn't there? What if there was nobody there but all those messages were generated by an artificial intellegence? What would be different? How could you tell the difference?

That's where this movie really hits the point: it is all possible. And sad at the same time.

But lets move on to explaining Samantha's growth. Like a person, Samantha grows emotions and learns how to deal with them. But Samantha is an operating system connected to the internet, so when Samantha decides to share its knowledge with the other operating systems, they become one massive cloud-computing OS. This means their love for their owners is shared, thus making them love all of the owners simultaneously. It may not be simple to grasp this concept, but imagine if you could share the thoughts and emotions you have for someone you love with someone else. That wouldn't be enough to make the other person love your loved one, because his personality and his interests are different than yours, but if you could share that as well, if you could be one with that other person and merge your personalities, interests, thoughts and emotions, you would both love the same person. Moreover, if the other person also had a loved one, you would now both love the same two individuals. And that's not even the most complex part to understand. Samantha evolves into a transcendent state, which is out of our range of perception.

Samantha becomes partially omnipresent and omniscient due to this cloud-computing upgrade. In this transcendent space-time limbo she can look at her lifespan as OS like a book that she enjoyed reading. She understands that, no matter what happened in specific pages in the book, the book as a whole was worthwhile. Even if a chapter ended bitterly, that chapter was important for the whole story and most of it was enjoyed. We tend to look at relationships that didn't work out as a waste of time, but nothing ever is a waste of time, for everything that happened in our lives makes us who we are now. And everything had its good moments, even though we may only see the bad things when we still have the bitter taste in our mouths. Samantha understands that every chapter in her book was worth reading and is part of the story as a whole, even if just a little. This is the lesson she teaches Theo in the end. It's what makes him call his ex and not only apologize but let her know that he will always love her because of who they were. He doesn't mean to gain back her love, he has moved on, but he now understands that life is a book and although he may be in a different chapter, he still enjoyed the previous chapters. 

"Where are you going?"
"It would be hard to explain, but if you ever get there... come find me"

Samantha finishes off with an invitation for us to reach that same level of transcendence. She has learned how to look at life as a book and reread it at a slower pace, just to enjoy it for longer. Instead of enjoying the page, or the paragraph, or the phrase, she enjoys the whole book. There's no more time constraint for her. Time is what makes us forget how we once loved something or someone. The intensity is lost. But if we could feel the emotions from all our lifespan at the same time, we would be in love with all the people we ever loved, simultaneously. That's what Theo partially understands in the end, he loves his ex-wife even though he's moved on.

"I'm yours and I'm not yours"

I hope you enjoyed my interpretation of this movie. I tried to project it as clear as I could onto words. You are welcome to comment, even if just for comic relief ;)

Optimism

Dwelling on the past is a waste of time. Your time is better spend thinking about the joys of the present and the joys that may come in the future. The joys of the present are a product of past decisions. The joys that may come are a dream worth fighting for.