I am annoyed by music right now. Nothing seems interesting. Bands are all so young and singing about things I don't find important anymore. The tunes are all the same and nothing is really jumping out at me, making me excited about music. I feel rather nomadic right now, with my job, my life, and my interests. There are things I want to do and perhaps even work up to, but right now things are as they are and I am working towards nothing. I have no goals, no direction, no next step. There was always a next step and when there isn't, I have difficulties accepting my current situation. We work for years in school to do well to move onto the next grade. We work hard to get into college. We work hard in college to get good grades, so we can get a good job or get into graduate school of our choice. We work hard in graduate school to finish faster or write a paper or get money to continue doing more work to get more money....it is a vicious circle.
I find it difficult at times to understand the concepts of academic science. We write papers so that when we are applying for grants, we get a good score and get the grant, which then gives us more money to write more papers and ultimately apply for the grant again. The point in there, somewhere, is that we are doing all of this to further our knowledge of scientific understanding. We ask hard questions and try to answer them and hope that others enjoy the papers we write. In the beginning, though, we get little that drives our ego about these papers. Nobody responds to the fact that I am an author on an interesting paper. It is simply out there. It's like writing this blog, nobody will probably ever read it, except my wife, and so..why should I write it when I already tell her everything I am writing in person. I have looked up the papers I have published to see how many times they have been referenced and usually it is very very few, mostly by other papers coming from the same lab. So...am I actually contributing to science or simply publishing information that will never be thought about by anyone else. The best novel in the world, but nobody has ever read it.
Then we just use the fact that we have written dozens of papers to gain status, perhaps moving up in rank (more pay maybe), or being asked to write a paper for the purpose again that nobody will read it. Do we write papers to gain credibility in our thoughts. We do research and then ask others to verify that the research was worth doing....only after the fact, yet we have already been approved to do the research by a grant that is ultimately reviewed by the same people (usually) that review the paper. It is as if a network of our peers tells us that it is okay to do research and then afterwards tell us again that it was okay that we did the research. What was the point of doing the research, then? I guess in the name research we are trying to answer questions and figure out something that nobody else understands, moving ahead human understanding. We are historians...all of us. We are not studying human history, politic events, wars, famous people, etc., but we are studying natural history. All of biology is simply a means of discovering what is already there. Sure we invent tools that appear on the surface to do something beyond what is natural, but in the end we simply use that tool to understand what is already there. We are not inventors of any sort.
Physicists do the same thing. They invent very sophisticated machines to study particles that already exist. Now the atomic bomb, that was an invention. Harnessing energy that does exist, but not in this state. That was research that lead ultimately to a new device of which nature did not intend. All of the science behind the bomb, though, was simply uncovering the information that was already there, yet was not fully discovered. Chemistry, perhaps the only original science, strives to create compounds that do not normally exist. It is a quest to make something new and unnatural. Chemists, in reality, are those that further the market by creating new drugs that interact in ways that the biologists have figured out. If the biologist had not figured out what was already there, then the chemist would not be very successful....but this is not completely true anymore. Now the chemist can randomly design compounds of all types with no purpose in mind and the biologist must then devise a method for trying to fit these orphan compounds into a useful slot.
So even now I strive to create assays that better can detect what is already there, what was always there, and what nature has always known. It is amazing that we pay so much money to uncover history in better ways. It is like paying someone more and more money to invent a pick or an axe and ultimately design a steam shovel.
I am sad by these thoughts because I ask myself what is the point. It seems like a vicious circular game. Sure we want to help people live better and longer lives....and make our lives simpler and easier, so we simply get fatter and less healthy because our lives are so easy. It is a paradox in fact. Technology works hard to make us more sedate and then medicine has to come in and reverse the pitfalls we have created, that of sloth and a life of liesure. Man is creating his own demise. We make things simple and then tell people to reverse that and go work out. What is working out but recreating a life that we have tossed behind us, one that we have stived to get rid of...one that we have fought hard to despose of, so we can sit around all day and the world comes to us without moving a muscle. Poetic justice in a way...man makes himself sick and then pays to understand how we can trick nature into reversing this sickness.
We would all be healthier if we had less available food, less processed food (less technology), had to work harder for the food, had to work harder to live and still plowed a field or hunted. Instead we devised a way of moving ourselves without applying more than a slight pressure on our foot and have made jobs where we simply stare at a screen from a comfy chair and type all this information to each other without ever having to get up and walk to meet someone else. We have instant messaging now and e-mail that makes it unecessary to really get up and go anywhere, and yet remain in contact with the world.
It really is the ultimate paradox....our own technology will be our own demise.
Things have been both good and bad in my daily life. I constantly fall in love with my wife over and over again, she is just so amazing. I am a lucky man. The bad is in work, although it is sometimes work I quite enjoy, at other times I wonder why I must be a constant nomad across a sea of limited-potential jobs. I look out there at what I find fascinating, but then think about the amount of schooling involved in this direction and have to think what can I do with what I have now.
Music hasn't had much of a place in my head lately. I barely even turn on my stereo. There just isn't anything that is exciting me....everything sounds the same. I started thinking about the structure of songs and how we as a society are constantly reinviting the same sounds...something to do with what we as humans are drawn to and enjoy or find enjoyable. I wonder where rock music will go...perhaps nowhere...maybe it will some day become like classic or jazz or blues and just another music that had its day and then was pushed out of the mainstream. Maybe I am just getting older now and don't feed on music for my life and passions. The words in songs don't have any relevance to me...the teenage angst is a far ago thought and even my 20's have now passed. I am older than most of the musicians that make it to the radio. I am even older than the age at which the classic rock musicians made their best songs. John Lennon was only 30 when the Beatles broke up, so although I love the Beatles music..the thinking of those years that was put into the songs is maybe not even part of my life anymore. It's confusing to say...but I guess we all grow up eventually...we all get stalled in our music interests and suddenly realize that buying a cd isn't realy very important.
