I dear say that the last time I sat down to write a blog entry, I had just made the biggest commitment of my working life. It was to do a 3-year BSc degree in nutrition science at King’s College London. I am now more than halfway through the degree and inevitably my mind has started wandering into the dark terrain of ‘the future’, nudged along by a shower of enquiries from well-meaning individuals.
As an advocate of the YOLO philosophy of life, I struggle daily to resist the blanket hegemony of social conditioning that originates and fuels the prevailing neoliberal order. This conditioning imposes on us the conventional (some would say “moral”) way to live an adult life which is to get yourself onto a career path, accumulate material wealth for yourself or for others, ‘progress’ in that career and accumulate more material wealth for yourself or for others until you’re too old to be useful to the system. For a minority of people, especially those born with plenty of capital to start with, this order may suit them just fine. For the majority, though, the order tramples on their freedoms and potential (creative potential, especially) and life becomes one of mere survival - with a few glasses of wine or whiskey on the side. Unfortunately, until a serious viable alternative to the capitalistic liberal order (which should include a provision for universal basic income), the great majority can forget about discovering their true human potential in this lifetime.
Anyway, this isn’t actually what this post is about.
It’s about 2 things:
(1) If I can’t overturn the system, I will attempt to evade it where possible by creating my own job rather than finding one (unless I get accepted onto a PhD programme!). Nothing groundbreaking here. No boss, no holidays, it’s all been done before.
(2) Use the remaining time I have as a student, I will reacquaint myself with philosophy to give my spirit a boost through the dark remaining days of YOLO-meets-TheSystem. In this I have made a start. I’ve just finished reading Carlos Rovelli’s international bestseller ‘Seven Brief Lessons on Physics’. It’s a bestseller because Rovelli has achieved something that is really hard to do, which is to distill the essence of modern physics in less than 100 pages and in a way that brings out the beauty and poetry of reality. He paints Einstein’s theory of relativity and the forbidden mathematical tangle that is quantum mechanics in broad elegant strokes that even those who failed A-levels physics will be able to apprehend and appreciate.
The main messages that I’ve taken away from the book are that (a) what’s ‘real’ are events/happenings not things and (b) that ‘time’ is a fabrication of the human mind based on our partial grasp of reality. Both these messages conspire to make an absurdity out of chasing fame and fortune or, indeed, participating in the rat race.
(a) quantum physics predicts that at the very smallest degree of magnitude, the world of atoms and subatomic particles, a particle only exists when it interacts with another. In other words, there are no such ‘things’, only interactions (information exchanges). We can understand this at eye level in our every day social interactions, or when we zoom down to microscopic and molecular events, or scale up to meteorological and cosmic events. Everything that is is in flux. In addition, these interactions reveal themselves to us as statistical in nature. So, if we go back to the level of the subatomic particle, mathematics can only predict where that particle will emerge with a given probability, but not certainty.
How does this relate to our day-to-day reality? When I was reading through my CV during one of my frantic ‘get real’ panics, I realised the implication of what I was looking at. I had in front of me a chronological list of events/happenings and interactions. There was nothing concrete about it (including the fact that I was reading a digital copy of it) and therefore it seemed silly that I should get so hung up about (whether or not I consider myself a success or a laggard). The person who partook in those interactions no longer exists and even the living memory of that person maybe faulty. Us humans, however, seem wired to want to possess, to create objects of possession and attachment, and then to boast about them. These objects can be material goods, buildings, money, people - even ‘identity’ and ideas. (Need I say that these are often a primary source of our unhappiness?) Similarly, our CVs are something we want to wear as a badge of honour, with our achievements emblazoned across our bank accounts and social media networks. Something to call ‘mine’ even though it’s nobody’s.
Looking at my CV in this way, I realised that our common notion of progress is also illusory. If we transpose the statistical nature of subatomic outcomes to our macro world, then we should not make it our primary goal to progress in a linear fashion as such a path may go against the laws of nature. Instead, we should be open to and embrace the myriad opportunities that emerge through our various interactions, and experience them for what they are. People often talk about the ‘synchronicity’ of events that occur in their life as if there was some meaningful overarching narrative to explain such occurrences. But the reality is that they only notice this synchronicity when it in fact occurs, forgetting all the times when things don’t go their way, or, indeed, the personal effort that went into aligning those fortunate events. Daniel Kahneman, doyen of behavioural economics, might say this is an example of our congenital lack of statistical intuition.
All this might sound rather bleak. Does it mean that we can’t find meaning in our lives? As a human, I’d like to say “no” and believe that there is a case for creating meaning. We can construct it if we experience the happenings in our lives to the fullest. To adopt the overused and abused term, we ought to be ‘mindful’ of the up and down moments, otherwise we miss out on life. From our realisation of the beauty and rhythm of these ephemeral ebbs and flows emerges our subjective meaning. To put another way, meaning is lost when we we habitually rush about or run on autopilot. Also, in attending to our interactions we attend to our relationships, whether with other people, with animals, with places, with the planet. We become more humane because of this switch in focus, from a life chasing returns and ever-shifting goal posts to one that nurtures relationships. We are, after all, defined by our relationships: whether we are a son, mother, teacher or tennis player.
On the question of time and its passage, Rovelli pulls no punches when he says that it’s an illusion that emerges out of our incomplete apprehension of the fabric of reality. In the quantum world, there is no such distinction as past/present/future. It all just is. At the macro scale of interaction, we are physically unable to perceive the minutiae of reality and therefore see it for what it is. What we perceive and understand everyday is vastly incomplete. The variable ‘time’ emerges from our incomplete understanding but has no basis in finer reality.
Yet this limitation, of time as an artefact of our limited faculties, is what drives us to seek meaning and live purposefully. We have a sense of urgency that our time in this version of the world is limited and therefore we feel compelled to “do things” while finding or creating stories that comfort and shelter us away from what may otherwise be a short brutish life. If we attend more to the processes and happenings that occur in our lives instead of focussing solely on end goals, our perception of time may actually slow. In response, we may save ourselves stress and anxiety - the energy of which can be diverted into feeding our innate curiosity with the ways of nature, of which we are an inextricable part.
Thank you Carlo Rovelli for opening my mind and reminding me that the world is a wonderful place.
