Three Quasi Unrelated Thoughts to Start the Year

Things on my mind that made me twirl my hair

This is a collection of brief essays on three (apparently) unrelated subjects, and maybe I’ll turn one (or all three) of them into a full-fledged piece in the future. For now, this is what I was ruminating about over the first (quiet) hours of the new year. 

Think Good

Nostradamus (his real name was Michel de Nostredame) was a French astrologer and physician that in 1555 published Les Prophéties, a collection of 942 poetic quatrains (poems of four lines) predicting future events. Many of Nostradamus’ supporters agree that he predicted major historic events such as the French Revolution, both World Wars, the rise of Hitler, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Others claim that he also predicted the Apollo Moon landing in 1969, the death of Princess Diana, and the 9/11 attacks. 

The guy was good at prophecies.

I remember when we were kids, if someone tried to predict something, we would say to them “Who are you, Nostradamus?”. Or something like that. Everybody knew Nostradamus.

And everybody likes prophecies, their aura of mystery, their propensity for tragedy, for severe human dislocation. Prophecies are largely negative occurrences, or at least the word “prophecy” tends to be associated with bad things that will happen. There’s something insanely attractive about doom and gloom, something obscurely sexy, something abysmally exciting. So maybe that’s why prophecies are usually about tragic events. But why, though? Why do they have to necessarily envision something tragic? Can’t they be about good things, for once? Can’t we have a prophecy saying that, at some point, humans will realize that wars are useless and that we can all live in harmony and peace around the planet? Or that dancing will finally be banned on social media? 

I want to think we can. We sure are capable of predicting good things. Maybe if we all make the effort of coming up with good prophecies, good (or better) things will have a higher probability of happening. I believe in these universal forces.   

I’m no Nostradamus, but I’ll try to think of a few great events that will occur in 2023, or later. It’s more important that they happen at all, than that they happen in 2023. And I invite you to do the same; go ahead and craft big, awesome prophecies. 

I won’t write about my greatly positive prophecies here, but I’ll say one thing. While writing this piece, I stopped for a few minutes to think about what good prophecies I would want to come up with. Staring at the wall in front of me, I just let my mind wander. All I could think of were things affecting humanity, things having a positive impact on our collective lives, tides that would raise all boats. Nothing about me specifically. And I was grateful for thinking in these terms, for unconsciously giving myself permission to subordinate thoughts about my own good to those about the good of everyone. But then, isn’t it obvious that if I’m part of the whole, and I have good prophecies for the whole, these good prophecies will affect me as well? How simple, yet powerful, is that?

I read this

This morning I was reading an old post by Scott Alexander titled “Meditations on Moloch”, in the excellent blog “Slate Star Codex”. 

It starts with Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem on Moloch, and goes on by saying "Moloch is introduced as the answer to a question -- C. S. Lewis’ question in ‘Hierarchy Of Philosophers’ -- what does it? Earth could be fair, and all men glad and wise. Instead we have prisons, smokestacks, asylums. What sphinx of cement and aluminum breaks open their skulls and eats up their imagination? And Ginsberg answers: Moloch does it. [...] The implicit question is – if everyone hates the current system, who perpetuates it? And Ginsberg answers: ‘Moloch’. It’s powerful not because it’s correct -- nobody literally thinks an ancient Carthaginian demon causes everything -- but because thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief the degree to which the system isn’t an agent."

This is a long post, but well worth the time and focus it takes. Alexander’s ability to write about complex subjects in easy, relaxed terms is typical of those sharp minds that have the courage to ask themselves stupid yet infinitely profound questions, until they come up with simple, coherent, and sensitive answers. They do their beautiful thinking for all of us, and we should be grateful for their mere existence.   

I think it’s a good (almost necessary) habit to read this piece at the beginning of each year, even though it might feel more and more depressing as years go by. I find it refreshing and actually auspicious every time I do, regardless of how worse our world might have gotten in the meantime. But the fact that there are people in it that have the brilliancy and the clearness of mind to write pieces like this one gives me infinite hope.

Attempts at who I am

To understand who you are, mistakes play a critical role. For me, it’s been two in particular: choosing to do something because it was considered cool and not because I liked it, and not having the courage to admit to myself that that something really sucked (or, rather, that I really sucked at that something). My trajectory has been profoundly shaped by these two recurring mistakes -- I wouldn’t even call them mistakes; I guess they were (are) mindsets, demeanors, or maybe simply weaknesses. Yes, that’s what they are: very expensive weaknesses. What else would you call something that keeps you from following your real vocation while time inexorably goes by? 

I wasn’t really cut to study business and economics, yet getting into the best business school in the country was something prestigious, and a challenge that looked cool to meet. Plus, I was sort of meant to study that because of my dad’s business. “He’ll go to Milan and study at Bocconi, and then he’ll go to Boston to get his Master’s”, my dad would often say when I was little, in conversations about me with others, projecting onto me what life prevented him from doing himself. Dad was super smart, self-made and very successful, but he had to be all of that out of necessity: times were tough and he had a big family to support after negative circumstances drove his dad out of work. So he dropped out of college and worked his behind off and created a thriving business out of nothing and grew it to an unexpectedly large size and I was so proud and had a tremendous amount of respect for him. Nothing was ever imposed, but dad’s strong personality and success made his ideas resonate whenever we would talk about my future. Things were written for me, and I had no time to think about who I really was, no time to be confused, no time for self-discovery. Or maybe I just didn’t have the guts (or will) to go against what dad so proudly had in store for me. I didn’t want to let him down. And at times I even enjoyed what I was doing: grades were good and I was top of my class. But it was an expensive choice, an investment that shaped everything else. That had to shape everything else.

I’m still not entirely sure of who I am, and maybe this is not surprising for someone who likes to do a lot of thinking and a lot of doubting. But over the years I have gotten more and more sure of who I am not. And that’s already something. What would I have liked to study instead of business and economics? Maybe literature, maybe medicine, maybe music. Hard to say what things would have been like in retrospect, but I discovered that the humanities (in which I like to include medicine as well) would have been more natural and stimulating for me. What does this tell me about me? That I’m a sucker for restless thinking. 

The German mathematician Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi would say “man muss immer umkehren” (that loosely translates into “invert, always invert”). In trying to solve a difficult problem, he would apply the strategy of inverting it. Sometimes focusing on finding out what something is not helps in better understanding what that something is. I feel the same may be applied to trying to understand who we are: focus first on who we’re not, and the rest -- slowly but surely -- takes care of itself.