I see the surge in blog content as a byproduct of my increased capacity of academic writing, in this I am appeased. Also, for the sake of disambiguition, I often talk to myself in second person. So the title here might as well mean “Note to Self: Before I Lose Myself Again”.
In Series …
THE APERIODICALS
Local (personal, potentially shallow, and subject to change) outlooks on science, technology, growth, and occasionally culture and history. The goal is to write something every week, but whether it can make its way to FWPhys is random. Hence the series title.
This post is also available as a podcast.
Where Not to Lose Yourself
I hold that I motivate my own curiosity and drive to an appreciable degree — enough to make life always feel worth living, arXiv worth opening. Not enough to become physics professor at MIT any time soon, of course. Anyway, it remains a nontrivial theme to ponder the meaning of life and why I associate mine with science.
With great appreciation and hesitation, I have been approached by students with similar sounding questions, “why do I study science / why do we need science?”. So far my best answer has been along the lines of “… but nature doesn’t slow down”.
Everyday life through millions of years of fine-tuning endowed us with appreciable “instinct” that help navigate the world at our scales: survival over mountains1, along rivers, and through seasons. Just beyond what the earth prescribed, however, are a limitless expanse of weirdness and unexpectedness. Not even a natural anchor is guaranteed against which we could position our intellect and self-vision.
Push a large cement block and it will crumble in its own inhomogeneity, unlike any “rigid body” we so confidently describe in school books; atomic collisions are nice and easy to depict but a billion-billion-billion of such events take place in every keystroke I make to type this essay; cosmic messengers come and go, some right through us in great numbers, without ever guarantee we would ever pick them up; the world, taking people you care about along, ages, no matter how hard you plead.
Nature doesn’t slow down.
In the obviously semi-autobiographical Poem I wrote in my office last week, In the Sight of a Mirror 03, I attempted to construct a unified explanation to several of my characteristics, that I am (while capable of being happy) unusually stern, that I have a tendency of burning up considerable mental energy on the impossible tasks in inter-personal, romantic, or professional settings, and that I, in general, feel like a profoundly conflicted being while steadfast on certain pursuits of life.
In the poem I speculated that such an existence was the rational result when faced from an early age with a grand self-constructed delusion that sorrow — even sorrow over others’ time ticking away — lets me escape from the dread of my own ticking clock. That I get to waste my time because deep down I don’t yet profoundly believe it’s finite.
And then I’d go and lose myself.
I lost myself in various menial sidelines, more than once mistaking others’ wise avoidance of the same traps that I occupy as my bravery and/or good fortune.
Without getting into the overly detailed or self-degrading path that I stand against2, this list includes dating or at least developing crushes on multiple people that were not emotionally available, getting way too involved in the collection and curation of 3+ (age rating) toys when I was 22, and self-indulging in the arts without optimising my attitude to gain experience through them. Iridium Point and LUX each remains a creative outpost I am hopeful and proud about, just that my music reaches fewer than ten new listeners every month, and the photos haven’t seen feedback apart from the general “Cool, OK, next”. Not that I ever spent the same rigour as I learned physics to study those fields.
As I retract those figurative tendrils back to my main focus on Physics, and as I feel I am again at the start of an episode of unilateral, unproductive, and irksome parasocial romance, I believe it’s rather productive to yell to myself (here),
Please. Stop.
WherE to Lose Yourself
This shorter section deals with a related but distinct meaning of “Losing Self“. It is also aimed at providing a solution to the problem described in the previous section.
Growing up I’ve been measured against two different standards of smart. The high achiever in the education system, and the deep independent thinker. I score pretty high on the former — root of my confidence in most rooms — but I don’t think even myself sufficiently value my ability in the latter.
From an early age I’d been in love with the feeling of returning to reality after a long time thinking about things — I’d sometimes talk myself into sleep, the other times.
Recently, through my interactions with great adults, an idea has formed in me that while being the former kind of smart has opened up doors and brought bragging rights to the family — it was useful — the latter is where an intellectual makes a stand against time.
One learns to get “lost” on command.
One gets lost with great passion and interest into a topic. One gets lost in research and reading. One gets lost in deep, long, and intensive inquiries into a field that intrigues them. One gets lost with great focus and ability to filter out any and all environmental noise: among myriad inconsistent pieces of information, investigate the true nature of systems, phenomenons, objects, self.
One gets lost in cool proses One gets lost in life itself.
Ending remarks, the Lux instagram Story Feed
I guess the message in this essay is that I should not tie self in the imagined and romanticised threads with infinite capacity to drain life away, and should rather enjoy doing more nontrivial, intellectually independent, and intensive work despite, on the surface, the isolation it entails, no matter if it is from persons of interest, and from world news headlines.
Most readers might know (or, more optimistically, remember), that I made my mark on the interwebs primarily through my Instagram page, in those self-disappearing “stories”. Mildly funny jokes that are mostly observational humour, doom scrolls that seep through from other social media, occasionally a cool photo or stories behind a shoot, and more occasionally hidden message I was confident She cares nicht. The greatest number of my connections are there yes, including the crush yes, but is that a really wise way to leave a legacy?
A digital garbage pile when I could be working on physics?
Yourong Frank Wang 