No longer noticing life around us

Since the pandemic, people became more addicted to their devices than ever before. One answer I heard as to why a person dear to me watches so much youtube is "there needed to be some voices in my (empty) house". While I was impressed by the answer, I don't agree that we should all become youtube or TV addicts just to hear somebody else's voice. FYI: the person is about four years older than me, and was not around when the dinosaurs walked on Earth whatever my four year old might tell you.

When I see people on the street walking with headphones in their ears, it seems wrong. When I go out I have to make sure that my one year old does not kill himself. But even if I went out without the baby, I would still like to hear the various noises around me. Hearing makes me feel safer. When one goes out in nature, shouldn't they listen to the birds? even when there are only sealgulls and pigeons around, I like to hear the waves. I don't like unnatural sounds like those from cars, but often one has little choice. However, everyone else around has headphones and listens to some pre-registered music, while I try to listen to the music of the life around me.

Both my principles and I feel old. I use my phone to talk to people, and when I don't talk to somebody I put it down. But if we no longer listen to the life around us, can we really live life in full? It seems obvious that we'd at least be more more likely to prevent accidents if we open our eyes and our ears when we walk on the street. When I sit in the train, I look out the window. My kids still fight over the window seat in the plane or train, but few people look out the window today. They all look at their phone. Some listen to the news, some look at videos of themselves, some look at movies, some look at videos of their friends, etc. I've even seen a few people reading books on the train, but I don't see people looking out the window any more and I see very few people looking around them when they walk on the street.

Am I the only one who is crazy and does not appreciate progress? Perhaps... but I still think there is so much beauty and so many troubles around us that we no longer notice or try to fix because we forget to look around.

The game of make believe

Children should play games of make believe, but they should also be allowed to do things that matter. The latter is where our society fails them and us. Not allowing a child to do things that matter is like telling them that they are good for nothing and doing so every day of their life. After destroying our own children we attract immigrants to do the jobs for us. It only works for a generation or so because the next generation is likely to be destroyed. So, then we take more immigrants and the cycle continues...and, yes, we hate them and our reliance on them. We hate them because they do what we cannot. Because they are stronger and better than us -- for a short while.

The people who are best at playing the game of make believe often end up in charge. Some are our politicians. Since games are similar throughout the world, the political class is like a group of related white men. They are the ones selected for their ability at make believe and so they are all similar. They sometimes appear trustworthy, but they almost never are. They are like actors only their looks matter less than their ability at game playing.

This game was most obvious during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our politicians took strong action to show that they were doing something. It was is the kind of action taken by weak people because action without thought of consequences destabilizes an already frail society. They first applied the zero-COVID-19 policity: a game where they aggresively isolated the few detected cases of a virus that spreads like a cold, knowing that there were more cases out there that they could not find or isolate. They put patients without symptoms that caried the potentially deadly virus in hospitals and in old people's homes. Then because even they figured out the virus has spread, they closed hospitals, they closed schools, they closed all institutions, and even stopped people from walking on the street unless they knew the hours at which we went out. As expected the virus could not tell the time. Some of the measures hastened the spread, some slowed it down, but only temporarily. The results are surprisingly similar throughout the world: the excess death for 2020 is about 0.2% of each country's population for most countries -- with some exceptions that include Sweden who had less draconic measures. Now we have a vaccine, but the virus has always been a moving target. It mutates like most cold and flu viruses. So, we are told we should live with the virus, which was obvious from the beginning given the rate at which it spread. We could have never isolated all COVID positive cases unless action was taken when they were very few, i.e., long before it got to Europe and the US. I will take the third vaccine soon. I want to do everything I can to protect myself and my family, but while the vaccination program works, I feel the rest of the response is and has been woefully inadequate and has blissfully taken us to untested territory.

So what do people want from life today? To do as little as possible and to continue playing the game while spending as much time as possible on our mobile devices. The latter seems to have harmful effects, but we are all so addicted that we no longer notice. We prentend to care about the environment. Yet we cut the grass every two weeks to keep it neat and tidy. Cities even fine those who forget the grass cutting. We cut trees that have lived for hundreds of years. In the name of the environment, we, sometimes, replace a few of them with baby trees. We have concrete everywhere and then complain about the lack of biodiversity and the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In our game of make believe we take obviously inadequate action: we ban straws, we recycle through very energy inefficient processes, and we complain a lot about the weather. The latter is done to such an extent that it almost seems like doing something.

We'd like to have a future but only as long as we do as little as possible for it. We forget that every time we choose to do nothing we choose death over life. The only beings that do nothing are dead ones. So, it's not surprising that when we do that over and over again we approach an end. We are ill, we are depressed, we are overweight, and we can't easily get out of the cycle because all our lives we were told we are good for nothing. We write articles and tell ourselves that children who work are abused. Of course, child labour -- the backbreaking, toxic kind -- is wrong. But some resposibility for keeping the house clean, for feeding the animals in and near the house, resposibility for one's sibilings, for the elderly in our homes and in the neighborhood, for planting and watering plants, for painting one's room and even the house later on, for fixing things that break around the house, and for building some things that work and help those around us, etc is good. This responsibility used to be there in previous generations. It's gone today for most and it's replaced by screen time because both the adults and the school system are dysfunctional.

We choose our living conditions so that there is as little as possible to do. We should want to do as much as possible while we are young and can do it. Now instead of having teens that change the world for the better, we have teens that need to live in assisted living because they don't know how to change a light bulb. Yet migrants are the evil ones. When they cross the sea in plastic boats beacause of the damage done to their countries and to the environment and because our politicians like the game of not noticing the boat or their needs, we either emprisson or send them back because they are evil. They are our problem. And when we can't blame the migrants, we blame minorities since they are evil, too.

The one and only

I have read in the news that Miss Ireland is black. I think it's wonderful to celebrate diversity. However, after a long day of doing paperwork and of achieving nothing, I am so very tired of being "the one and only" -- that I find difficult to appreciate that I stand out. If I had a good sense of direction things would be better. But I don't, and tomorrow morning I still have to go all the way accross Barcelona to submit an electronic signature that our secretary has printed off. The bureaucrats here don´t have the concept of electronic, and I don't mean our secretaries. They are wonderful. They are the backbone of every institute and the ICC is no exception. But here I go again tomorrow with an unvaccinated one year old to submit an electronic signature on a piece of paper, ie., a paper that should have been sent as an email.

While I do this I am being helpfully reminded by my colleagues here that everyone goes through this. It takes about a month they say. A month of going back and forth and achieving nothing. Will this mean it will take three months for me since I have three children or four if I count myself? why can't this be automated? why are we risking sanity and lives while doing things like it's the 18 century? Because the society likes to sabotage those who work, and to particulaly sabotage those who stand out. Women should be able to do it all. The temporary positions and the lack of rights are just part of the package. Oh, and each child needs a different appointment and a different set of papers. My one year old can't get his special NIE number in the same time as me even though he is present, and getting an appointement takes at least a week. Why do they do this in person? Why? because they like to torture people, and people submit to this type of torture, and nobody screeams at them loud enough to get them to change things.

When I decided to have my first child, it was late 2009. This was more than ten years ago. I remember being four or five months pregnant with Edward (my pregnancy was evident, it must have been 2010), and attending a meeting by a panel of our faculty on how to succeed as a scientist. I was told I had no chance -- that no woman they have ever met who has chosen to have a child before getting a tenure-track position has suceeded. Where they right? They just said what they thought. And perhaps they were correct! Here I am more than 10 years later dragging a child with me and leaving two other behind for a position similar to what I had back then. That I've started dragging them one at a time is due to my mother who looks after the other two at the age of 74 with some unkown heart issue. I do know some talented women who have had children before having tenure. They had very supportive partners who made plenty of sacrificies in their place. However, by now, most colleagues from my year either made it to the permanent realm or quit.

In 2010, I remember being told I was the first woman in the building to have a child. I heard the same comment today from our secretary. I am the first woman with a child the university has ever done paperwork for, and so they did not know how to proceed. I asked if they just meant the physics department and not the whole university, and it seems the university lacks the expertise, but maybe I misheard. However, I do need a "Miss one and only" crown.

I sometimes wonder if I know when it's time to quit. Perhaps I don't and I keep persevering in lost causes with few other survivors. No survivors are to be reported locally as of today.

Rentering dracula's castle

I am going to be a bit dramatic in this post, but I feel I can afford to. It´s my birthday today.

So, why the parallel between academia and dracula's world? Everyone in academia dreams of a permanent position. The dream does not make sense, and yet we dream it and convince all students and postdocs to dream it, too, and create a form of dracula's castle from our buildings and research groups. They all look the same and feel the same with some differences in beaurocracy. In every place you see the students who seem to never graduate. They lost the funding from their first position or did not get along with their advisor or they do but the advisor does not have the knack of picking projects that can be finished. It's difficult to envison my kind advisors as dracula. In fact, I can't, it's the system that forces the blood suckling. The students and postdocs split in two categories. Those who are strong enough to give blood, walk around, and later hope to become permanent in the system, and those who are't. The permanent positions are few and far between. So, the system relies on those who are strong enough to give a lot of blood, and walk around without being able to find a permanent post.

The castle has plenty of myths and because of them we are afraid of light. We simply can't let light in. What if it kills us all? Some myths are true and some are clearly not. One obvious example is the garlic. It does not keep academics away especially when one wears masks.

Of course, the blood needs to flow. Otherwise, there is no system, and the community does help you to accomplish many things. Humans would all be dead if they did not help each other. So, I get that. I just don't see why we can't let light in, and why each castle has to be so isolated from all others and even from its own branches while preaching interdisciplinarity. Of course, if we let light in, the myths would disappear, but it would also make it safer to see where you walked.

We prefer to stay in the dark and dream of permanency. Every one wants to be dracula, to get lots of blood, and do so forever and ever. It's a fake celling because the only thing that's certain and might be permanent is death - or at least permanent for our current incarnation if one believes in that. Yet the dream sustains enough of us to keep the system going. I have a certain reluctancy to start the blood letting every time I go back. It´s normal. I sometimes wonder why I go back. I think it's because the castle gives me a certain sense of security. It's also fun to explore things in the dark. I always hope that I'll be able to open a window, and convince people that it's ok to have a bit of light. There enough corners to explore where the light can´t penetrate. Or I have Stokholm's syndrome. I probably do.