Re: Life (May 30) / Chaotic Order
My life condensed into variably interesting posts on the internet
Welcome to Re: Life, where I chronicle my life, thoughts, and work in biotechnology on the internet. Why a newsletter? So that one day, a long time from now, aliens might find these little time capsules and put them in a museum. Now that you know my motivations are pure, let’s get started.
Actually, not until this announcement. As it turns out, this newsletter now has 470 subscribers. Honestly, I don’t know how that happened, but to all you friends, mentors, colleagues that keep reading this, thank you. Stay around for when we reach half a thousand!
Okay, let’s get started. For real this time.
What I’ve been up to
//: Currently preparing for school exams. This semester, I’ve got biology, chemistry, and physics all at once, so this is the real deal. My apologies to all the trees, but I ended up going through at least a few notebooks in the process.
//: Just finished an article that covers how fluorescence works at the quantum level. This is the first one I’ve written on Medium since about November, so this is where most of my time went (I wanted to make it memorable for the new debut).
//: The beginning of last week was a bit wild, so I happened to find myself in the local library more than once while after school waiting for my parents to pick me up.
I eventually got through about half of “The Courage to Be Disliked” by Ichiro Kishimi. At the weekly book sale, I also ended up snagging the entire biography of Steve Jobs for $10 (Canadian). That would be one of my prouder moments in life.
Thought of the Week
All the meaning we give to our lives comes from our tendency to assign causes and affects to what we do. These internal explanations for our circumstances give us the feeling that we’re always in control. But they can be toxic:
Ex. I can get angry at X because they did something I disliked. I can’t talk to this person because I’m not confident enough. I’d rather watch TV than talk to my family because I had an exhausting day.
We’re always coming to conclusions about we can and can’t do, what’s good and isn’t. We link things that shouldn’t be linked, and blame people that shouldn’t be blamed - twisting reality into something fictional that serves us.
Your mind will always write its own story. The big question is what kind of story you’ve chosen to write for yourself. Take some time to think about it.
For another day,
- A
//: Thanks for reading! I’m Aaryan - I’m a high-schooler from Canada, and my main work lies at the intersection between hardware and medicine, trying to build better diagnostics / imaging systems to help us treat cancer. When I’ve had enough of that, I watch the occasional episode of Silicon Valley and listen to lo-fi music. Frankly, I have no idea what I’m doing here, but that’s fine, since no one else really does anyway ;)