Yes, this sounds gloomy and depressing, it probably is, a little over 21000 proposals were submitted to compete for 1600 MSC grants. That’s just desperate. And it means once again, there’s another layer of complexity that I haven’t accounted for, a layer that requires understanding and an honest assessment.

Regardless, I found myself writing this after another academic event. A recurrent happening that seems to become a tradition somehow, since that’s when I wrote here last. In fact, the same exact setup, a nice Gala dinner at the University’s wine estate, an amazing spot for our special guests, it was also my first time visiting, it didn’t disappoint.

During the event, I managed to have a great time, maybe in goofy way, given the fine wine we were served, with new friends and colleagues, impressive people doing impressive things. We talked about a many topics. But what remained in my head was one of our colleagues arguing about the process of writing, and why AI should not take that away from researchers. The idea, as I remember it, is that writing is not supposed to be easy. Writing is hard, and it’s even harder when technicalities are more important than the stories. Writing is hard, because it’s when the writer thinks about the ideas they’re trying to communicate, and how these ideas relate together, and the best way to communicate these ideas and their relationships clearly, coherently and consistently. What’s left to a researcher if you take off this process?

This discussion, was not the part where I got inspired to write these words. Because after this, I was telling my colleagues that I only realised how hard writing a long-format text is, during my masters. Back then, I had no clue how to start. So I did what any AuDHDer does, side quest through, and thus this blog was born. It was much more simple back then. But the point was, if I don’t know how to write, maybe I should do it in a different setup and go through the process. A goofy blog about random topics is way less consequential than a thesis. Can you believe it I did this from scratch without AI assistance. Stackoverflow was king(or queen) indeed.

This was when my colleague told me the most inspiring sentence I heard in a while. He said: I’m actually seriously thinking about starting my own blog. I’ve been doing research for years, and I often find that some part within the process of finalising a project are really worth discussing or sharing. Those are the nice little things that you discover during the project, the tricks in software, or maybe nice visuals that don’t fit the in final output neither the main text nor the appendix. Those are also important to document and share.

Yes, Yes, Yes, those little things deserve to be documented and shared. And honestly, that would make a great alternative kind of literature that could become probably the most important and tangible source of knowledge for early career researchers. Regardless of the audience, it’s worth pursuing anyways. Back to basics, doing things properly, slowly, with clarity and transparency. Creating words with meaning sometimes, and without any some other times, and feeding the human slop back to the perfect AI training data.

It took a moment of embarrassment with some colleagues that I still can’t shake the awkwardness off my head, to get me to put these words together. Dear reader, this is my amends for drinking too much. And as a personal therapeutic exercise. I will try to argue for myself here what I failed to explain during a nice dinner with colleagues.

There are two reasons scientific conferences are exciting – the networking opportunities, and the free stuff. Dinners are epic, because most of the time drinks are free. And your boy here loves to feel nice, more so around people feeling nice themselves.

This conference however, was a bit different because I was not planning on attending, nor had I prepared well to present my work. I probably gave the worst outlook on myself and the faculty I belong to. But this is not really consequential, bad presentations happen, everyone forgets about it eventually, usually with a nice frosty beer in the sun. Comes the dinner, everyone was feeling nice. Great food, great company, great vibes, great discussions. Adding to all that, local colleagues were extremely polite and accommodating – as they respect their international counterparts and maintain most of the discussions in English, a detail I grew fond of and deeply appreciate.

Then, for some reason, I found myself trying to explain an awkward idea. Why I’m an ally to the LGBTQ+ community. An idea I had a few years ago when I was high, laying on the grass of one of the hills blessing the town I live in and staring at a clear sky. It was on that stupid hill, in that stupid situation, when I started contemplating my stance regarding this subject.

I looked into my own thoughts and saw a horrible reality, a world that’s only getting worse and a grim prospect for the average human being – intellectually, socially, physically. At that time, it seemed to me that this reality is unnatural, it feels exaggerated and artificially maintained by some kind of a power structure that feeds from the vulnerability of ordinary people.

Unlike my father, and his father before him, my financial situation and life outlook in general is not getting any better, but rather worse with every passing day and event. The ones that life is getting better for are the ones already in positions of power. By now this idea is so mainstream I bet whoever reads this is already thinking of Jeff Bezos. There are so many others like uncle Jeff – representing a social class that is extremely influential politically and powerful financially. Uncle Jeff is simply the exaggerated version. The only reason life is getting better for this social class is that their starting point, their status quo, is already too powerful – they can manage to bend the rules for themselves.

This social class acts as the gatekeepers to power, the one conserving the status quo and challenging any attempt of change, the one that has power, and the one that gives it to others when it chooses to. Remember when Elon Musk bought Trump his election with nearly 200 million dollars? For this social class, rules that apply to ordinary people do not apply to them. Remember that the president of the US – among many others – was a frequent visitor to Epstein’s pedophilia island? This is to say, with such reality and power hierarchy, there’s no path for ordinary people to have a potentially better life prospect. Because the reason their life is miserable, is others having it way too good. I would even argue that this imbalance between social classes is the reason for most of the suffering in this world. This evil that peaks as capital and politics entangle, eventually transforms itself into anarchy where political power is held hostage by whoever has the most numbers in the bank. A metamorphosis that maybe cannot be tamed through elections and peace.

This status quo does not only account for class struggles financially and politically, it’s also a struggle around social constructs and progress. This is the example of the civil rights movements in the US, when racists and white supremacists in power simply suppressed financially, politically – and probably through other channels as well – the black population of the United States. A population that was challenging the status quo represented by the alliance between racism, politics, and money conserving their position of power. They only conceded after years of struggles, of mobilisation, of marches, of challenges that destroyed lives, of violence that took some, and sacrifices that led to a new social convention where black lives do matter compared to the starting point.

However, these dynamics are generalisable not just to racial and ethnic minorities, but also to gender, immigrants, etc. This means redirecting the social panic from the actual issues of the inequality between social classes and the hierarchy of power it enables. Turning the debate around identity politics and other pseudo ideologies instead. Turning the real struggle of different groups of people into a virtue signaling exercise that reduces into a rainbow flag instead of a court decision. I remember in 2016, the democratic primary had two serious candidates. Bernie Sanders was saying we need to tackle social inequalities and hold the top 1% accountable and tax them more aggressively to improve the likelihood of most people. Hilary Clinton was saying, even if we hold the banks accountable, would that fix racism and homophobia? This contrast here is just to showcase the pillars of my arguments. I’m challenging those that are causing the social inequalities; the same dynamics that cause this power imbalance between different social groups in terms of political and financial influence, are also the same controlling social conventions and constructs. Challenging political and financial power by construction will lead to challenging the social conventions.

When I look at myself I feel that I align more with the struggles than with the power. I feel that part of my struggles is caused by the same alliance that oppresses people anywhere in the world. The same alliance that is now oppressing working class people, white and blue collars alike, as politics is losing its meaning and becomes a tool of the most rich for conserving their own reality. To me any class or group of people that challenge this structure, including the conventional social constructs and conventions, is my ally. And that definitely includes the LGBTQ+ community.

Burn the old gods, and the new ones. And if part of the price to pay for that is to accept people chopping off their dicks, and growing ones somehow, so be it.

Looking back few months ago before I came to Pécs, I had no idea what to expect. Everything felt blurry, uncertain and quite confusing. Few weeks in the city and I started to feel the difference in life style and general mood, and instead of feeling better and better about life in general I started panicking.

I’ve panicked because I realised that even though my stress levels have drastically decreased, and my general mood is improving as much, my productivity levels didn’t budge at all. This realisation made me question lots of decisions I made, including why I’m doing a Ph.D for a minimum wage scholarship, instead of focusing on my professional career as an analyst/developer?

I’ve always thought that I would thrive as a researcher given my curiosity and my eagerness to learn and grow. This was proven in my master’s thesis as I broke the limits of my knowledge and discovered cognitive abilities I didn’t think I had or were possible to accomplish before that time. That time was very hard to endure, not only because research is hard and require lots of focus and dedication, but also because at that time Tunisia was under lock-down due to the pandemic. So the stress was double and I don’t think I recovered from that yet.

However, as hard of a situation as it sounds, I liked it. I loved being in control of the things I learn, I loved writing about it, and I loved the results at the end. After graduation I worked for corporations and I felt miserable. I felt like a warrior in a garden, or a gardener in a war. I felt misplaced, misunderstood sometimes, and an impostor most of the time. Reflecting on this I realised that I was miserable because I knew that corporate work was suppressing my full potential. I felt that I was being slowly eaten by rust everyday I showed up to work. Thus to liberate my self is to liberate my potential. And a Ph.D was the way to go.

Somehow I still relate unleashing my full potential to my productivity. The more I do, the more I learn, the more I learn, the more things I can do. But even though this might have some truth to it, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the productivity crisis I’m going through now is related to a crisis in my potential. I have to remind my self that my productivity crisis is only temporary, while my potential is forever lasting. I have to understand that my productivity crisis exists because I’m still adapting to this new environment, and still determining opportunities and threats.

Indeed, I still don’t feel free, and still can’t feel that I’m working with my full potential. But here I am, trying to fight my way through the tasks, the papers and the meetings. Planting the garden that will bloom in few years a dissertation to coronate my efforts. At the end all I can do is dedicate myself some more, and focus on the things I can control.

I called the man in the high castle a few days later and we agreed on a date and time, we met in the conference room of the 8th floor of his company’s building, where I waited for him for about 20 minutes, he is a busy man after all. ‘Finally, he is here’, I said to myself after I heard his footsteps approaching the room’s entrance. ‘Hi Mohamed, how are you?’ he asked with a charming smile, we sat, and he immediately asked ‘From all your peers’, and he knows few, ‘you seem the only one who is still working in Tunis, I would like to know why!’. Long story short, the man in the high castle popped the bubble I was living in. The bubble where I settled and embraced mediocrity.

This all started when I was studying in Sousse I was very disappointed by the school, the courses, the students, and the quality of the experience in general. I was expecting some fancy-ass place where people are working hard to improve themselves and bring value to society, but I found none of that. I was struggling to make discussions or communicate ideas with people around me. The subjects, discussions, the words used, and what was perceived as achievements in that place did not differ at all from what you expect to hear in a popular café or bar anywhere in Tunisia. It was a place where mediocrity and shallowness are the rules not the exception and that was an important factor in the decline of my mental health during that period.

I needed to move forward. ‘Tatakae, Hsin, Tatakae’.

Days went by, and I found myself doing a master’s in TBS, where I found what is now my close circle of friends. The difference in the quality of the experience compared to what I witnessed in Sousse was remarkably superior from day one. It was a good break from what I went through previously, and basically what it’s like in most other schools and institutions in Tunisia.

After graduation, I applied for countless opportunities yet weirdly I only had one offer from National Pen and I accepted it, there I met some of my closest friends, and learned how to deal with my anxiety and how to be a true team player. Still, I hated my job due to the misery and despair I felt for not fulfilling my true potentialan. And bit by bit I stopped my side hustles, community engagement, personal projects, and other habits. The fear of rejection, being judged, and the fact that I had a truely amazing circle in the company kept me from dealing with how I felt about it. Essentially I trapped myself again in a bubble because it was the easiest way to manage my disappointment and dissatisfaction, just like what happened in Sousse. And this was the realization that struck me somewhere in the middle of the man in the high castle’s monologue. I felt sick for a few days after that encounter and consumed ungodly amounts of alcohol to comfort myself, yet I couldn’t be at peace.

I had to move forward again, I had to liberate myself, and my real potential.

There came the day I decided to revolt against the bubble again, I resigned after a few weeks from that exchange, and finally liberated myself from a tyranny I created out of fear and despair.

After leaving National Pen, I had to start over, question everything, and simply reflect on what I went through. The idea was to sell all the skills and experience I have, and use that to get a new job that might help me find meaning in my life(not that I don’t have any, but it kinda help to have a job you like to wake up to every morning). My job hunting journey was difficult and the path there was very rocky.

One month in I had a local company offering me a job as a BI analyst, while at the same time having another unofficial offer as an R consultant with the WHO Afro. I decided to go with the latter until they emailed me that they changed their minds for some reason and won’t proceed with an official offer even after I integrated their official communication channels. Basically I turned down an official offer for a non official one, waited for the best, but the best never happened at that point. You can imagine the heavy toll of such a severe disappointment on me adding to my already fragile mental state at that time, TLDR; it wasn’t good.

Eventually I had to move on and continue in my objective: landing a job that brings meaning to my life, a job that challenges me technically and that I can harness experience from doing it everyday.

Till that point, I couldn’t really tell how far or close I was to my objective, it was unclear to me how good or bad I was doing. I conducted countless interviews and technical tests but the response is usually the same, either “None”, or an email starting with “we regret to inform you”. The latter response was rarely transmitted to me though. Tunisian recruiters usually(except some rare examples as I said) never informed me of the fate of my application, I cannot fathom the idea that a professional recruiter would behave in such a rude and demeaning manner, it’s simply disgusting.

Every day I woke up, I had to come up with a new idea, I had to think on how to improve some projects, and make new ones. Every day I needed to reflect on the previous days, and figure out what went wrong or right. Every day, as confused and frustrated and maybe even depressed as I was I had to go forward. Moving forward got me sane to the point where I had 2 great offers at the same day, it was an amazing feeling, the biggest dopamine rush I’ve ever had in my life.

Cheers.!

The sight of what my team mates did on the 4 of June for me was unforgettable. A month before, on may the 4th I celebrated my birthday, but since we were working from home in different locations at that time we couldn’t meet. So a month later when we got back to the office, they surprised me with a late Birthday cake(which was super good, GOD!), and boy did they made my day, and probably my year.

2021 was hard on many people, I sympathize with anyone who went through hard times and acknowledge how fortunate I was to not live through any of those hardships. Indeed I’m grateful for all what 2021 had for me. Last year I told myself that I needed to become a nicer person. Usually I’m not, as I seek dominance through conflict and argue to respond rather than to listen and understand. I will not say that this was 100% eliminated this year, but definitely reduced to a noticeable degree according to close friends and family. This positive change and development wouldn’t have been possible if I wasn’t working with the team I currently belong to, I am forever grateful to them, I love them all.

I can’t be writing this article without mentioning one of the most intense experiences I’ve ever had. I’ve never had the opportunity to go on and camp in nature until this year, when a friend of mine suggested to me to go on an adventure, and so we did. We got lost and didn’t know where to go, we climbed the same mountain twice looking for the camping site, and then a third time to enjoy the view, got attacked by a pack of wild pigs, made new friends, and enjoyed a hot spring. All of that in 24 hours. I should camp more in order to escape the mediocrity and the stress of my daily routine.

Order is hard to establish, and sticking to it is even harder, but this year, I was capable of establishing a new habit and hitting the gym regularly. In fact lifting weights was a great help in fighting the darkness inside me, to start feeling better, looking better, and thinking better. This simple act of moving weights around changed so much in so little time I can’t imagine what would I be writing have I not started. The gym was probably the missing piece I needed to get my shit together.

Yesterday a year ago, I defended my thesis with honors, a month later I started in my current position at National Pen. 6 months afterwards I started looking for other opportunities and applying to positions where I can put to use my analytical edge. I was unfortunate for countless times to say the least, to the point that doubt overtook my thoughts and I started to loose my confidence and my motivation to go forward. Though each time I prepare an application where I’m a favorable candidate, I keep telling my self to lower my expectations and to simply control the emotional attachment to the potential change that might happen if selected. Despite all of that, the rejection email is always hard to read and digest. Harder it is when I have no explanation of why I was not selected.

Looking back at what went wrong this year, namely being rejected from everything, I don’t feel bad that it happened, rather I feel bad for not doing more to guarantee the candidacies, it was not just bad luck. I should have worked so hard to be the luckiest person in any of the application processes. But I don’t, it’s like a shadow version of myself protesting against me for applying and trying to go forward. I went through great positive changes, character wise and habit wise, now it’s time to use those changes in order to directly impact my professional and personal life. Next year, should be the year I stop sabotaging myself and out work the competition.

Cheers and happy new year!

When you work from home you have the flexibility to prioritize yourself when one got some free time. In simpler terms, working remotely does not make you less of a slave to the capital owner, but it gives more freedom to manage your time, tasks, and well being in a more flexible and efficient manner. And when you successfully balance the execution of your personal and professional priorities in this bespoke fashion, comfort is the ultimate result.

On another note though, I’ve been applying for different opportunities here and there as a data analyst, however I don’t seem to be lucky enough to actually get an offer, other colleagues have been complaining about the same outcome as well. The last opportunity I applied for I thought I did very well in the interviews, it seems however that the competition is harder than I thought it was, the recruiters went with another candidate.

I am not certain why this keeps happening to me, I worked hard on my website portfolio, I always prepare well to answer and ask questions in the interviews, I keep a diplomatic tone, carefully choose my words and stay extremely respectful, yet here I am griefing my fortune instead of writing about a new era in my career.

What the hell is happening? Am I just delusional and all of my work is just a mere reflection of my Conscientiousness rather than the quality of my skills and knowledge? Or am I so blind I cannot see my mediocrity in front of the recruiters and I’m somehow making a fool of myself? Frankly, it all happened before, and though I prepared myself to accept me either screwing up the interviews(which did not happen) or simply being rejected(that… did happen), the bare facts of the rejection email always hit harder than anticipated.

Frankly I think the simplest solution for this hell is to find someone to teach me how its all done, a mentor would definitely help me shorten much of the road I intend to go through. For the record, this is not a new idea but it seems that I need it more than ever, a great context for the R bookclub.

I’ve been thinking on what kind of new strategies that might get me out of where I am during this numb period, and the most important step of all was finding people who either went through the same process or undergoing a similar path as I am in terms of searching for the right career path or rather the right future they see themselves in, I did just that and will continue to. The fact that I’m writing now means that it might be working.

The new strategic shift that I think I should follow is basically stop thinking about the future and just embrace the present moment. This is critical because it is part of treating my chronic anxiety that’s holding me back from my real potential in every critical situation I went through, and this ladies and gentlemen needs to stop now. So I figured what’s better than finding excitement and just pursue it all the way when it’s possible.

Adrenaline might be the answer because hormonal reward might be what I really need to keep going and create the consistency and discipline needed for more important rewards and achievements.

On another note, I’m also changing the way I will be writing from now on. In fact I will stop the random personal opinion series, and shift directly to data based personal opinion series. I think this is an important decision and will make my content more credible for the reader and the community in general.

I also didn’t forget about the Tidy Tuesday challenge, getting back to the data viz challenges on twitter will be beneficial and important to the whole process as well as to the strategic shift I intend to do.

Finally I want to remind myself and the readers that life is super hard, and that sustaining one’s self is very important and should not be disregarded, and if the price one would pay to be financially independent is 8 hours a day, so be it, assuming of course that one uses the remaining 16 hours efficiently. In my case, efficiency would mean exciting things, adrenaline rush, and pushing harder and harder my self to its limits.

Cheers!

“No one exists on purpose, no one belongs any where, we are all going to die” - Morty

It was indeed a tiring month, my first in this new job. I am trying to recover and progress through rest and establishing consistent routines to be more productive, maybe I am just a control freak as well, who knows, ask my ex.

Through this post I wanted originally to shed light on the cheesiness of some interventions I make during job meeting or while having conversations with people I don’t know, but frankly my existentional crisis is way more complicated than I thought it was, and being cheesy is the least of my worries right now.

Indeed I am working on fulfilling my new year resolution of becoming less of a dick than I am, it feels like having another full-time job that needs constant attention and focus, most of all an utter self awareness that defies thousands of years of biological evolution and animalistic instincts.

There’s no specific take from this post other than reminding my self of why I am fighting this world, because at some point I started forgetting all of this. Existence is pain by nature, and all we can do is basically minimize our suffering by making it only related to existence itself rather than because we are lazy, or because we didn’t work hard enough or, for my case because I was a dick to someone. My idea about all of this is that I should eliminate the external factors to suffering, put my house in order and build from there.

A famous argument in this regard is that my house is not in order because the world around me is crazy, and the only way to get my house in order is to fix the world in some way. But how would this be possible? How can a mediocre, heir of bad genes like me, or anyone else for the matter change the world in any sense? No one knows, not even those who actually put this argument out there. However, as much as I want to fight the world and its misery, at the end it doesn’t matter since everything is prone to death, or simply a certain end.

I tend to get attached or rather used to people,things and situations, as I really like stability, apriori plans and thrive in such context. However, this behavior is contradictory to what I initially pointed to(not caring, not fighting, and being passive about the world is the rational thing to do). In contast I find myself trying to fight, and embrace my inner survival instincts in a modern way, and at the same time not finding enough reasons to actually do so. Meanwhile the nihilistic argument in this debate attracts me more than the conservative side. This gray area is triggering my anxiety and might be the reason I was a dick few times these couple of weeks.

Basically if we sum up the whole thing:

• I am working on my new year resolution to be less of a dick.

• I am putting my house(life and routines) into order in an essay to actually embrace my human instinct and just survive this world with the least pain and suffering.

• Making this progress is paradoxal to my initial nihilistic thoughts that I consider more rational given all the modern contexts.

• Realizing the paradoxal situation I am facing is triggering my anxiety since it renders my thoughts unstable, which is the reason for me to be a dick in the first place.

Thank you for stopping by.

Since I’ve graduated last December, I took some rest and went right on looking for a job, however looking for a job around the new year appeared to be a very bad idea. Every company is basically either getting their accounts sorted, or just still planning for the coming year, so there was few to no opportunities for me to apply to. As for the few opportunities that were available at that time, and for one reason or another, apparently I wasn’t appealing enough for the HR’s. I think the reason for this is that most HR employees do not really understand the technical needs of their companies, and cannot grasp the technical issues that the candidate must address. Most of these employees just pick the honor’s kid from the engineering school, unaware of the lost potential of everyone else who are willing to grind like a Moulinex machine. Adding to that the fact that there is a lot of ambiguity regarding the JD of Data Scientists (since that what I was applying for), and the value they are supposed to contribute to the company with anyway.

However, unlike most HR’s in Tunisia, National Pen was different, warm, direct, open. It is especially different when the interviews are done on an international level with global managers and board members of the company, which means they know who you are and what you do inside the company. This is very rewarding when you are on the right track and doing well in your job, but can also mean that there’s a lot expected from you and not meeting the global standards can cost you your job.

My position in National Pen, unlike many of my peers who work there in the front desk operations directly with the clients, is in the back side of the desk. I query data, clean it, and send it to production, that’s all I do. Of course with some extra effort more contribution can be done to automate, polish, and optimize the processes from our team’s side. My direct supervisor who is based in San Diego, is frankly an inspiration, she automated a large chunk of the work load by herself and she adjusted her work hours to meet ours in Tunisia so she can help us with the process and the training. That level of commitment is just inspiring and one can only lower the hat in respect.

Moreover, this level of commitment is really scary for me, and it just pushes me to think about what I might be missing in other opportunities. Its a basic economic paradigm called “the opportunity cost”, i.e: the cost of what I am doing right now is not me doing it alone, but also what I might be missing out from not doing other things completely or partially. And for me that cost is academic research.

I thought I really wanted a career in academia, become a doctor(Ph.D. I mean), do research, and teach clueless teens(and adults) science. But getting to the corporate world, especially a multinational with a great culture just started to change my mind. The reason for this is basically the grounds for development, improvement, and learning, which does not only involve my JD in the company, but also can bring a positive contribution on my personal side-projects, which will allow me to enlarge and diversify my portfolio for future opportunities.

Now, to sum up : I am indeed afraid of commitment(instead I would be enjoying the company of a beautiful lady rather than writing this), but committing to a position where the superiors are an inspiration is very helpful to overcome this fear and build up the foundations over which I can in fact evolve professionally and personally in a friendly work place. These simple facts led me to rethink my plans and thoughts about academia and that is just overwhelming.

Thank you for stopping by.

I am indeed proud of what I have become these couple of years, but staying only interesting is not enough, as i said, I get no point for that anyway. So what should I do? I think before I think about the reviewer, I need to think about myself, and the skills I am able to bring to the table right now. I did some research and found that common skill-sets of successful consultants are basically

• The ability to produce production-ready outputs, in the forms of dashboards, packages, or simply data analysis.

• Strong foundations in statistics, or a specific field in which they specialize.

I think these are the most important attributes in let’s say “pragmatically interesting analyst”.

In this context I will have to give myself a chance to actually get back in the competition, and upgrade my game. This will be done as I progress in different projects that should be the corner stone of this upgrade. The first project should be without any doubt creating an R package that implements my Directional Double Bootstrap algorithm. This should be a major turning point for my skills. Second, I need to dive deeper with shiny dashboarding, as it is indeed one of the most important skills that I can bring to the industry, especially in my country. Lastly, I think I should deepen my knowledge in statistics, economics, and mathematics in order to be able to actually compete in a higher level.

Again, blogging about these stuff maybe isn’t the best thing I can do right now, but it helps put everything into the right perspective. I hope this actually helps anyone who might be living the same struggle as I am right now. I hope also they can afford to actually do this, because frankly its expensive to invest in one’s self. Sur-ce, I salute all of you hard working, broke, and strategic-thinking folks all over the world.

Thank you for stopping by.

There’s no bottom line to this event, its just the undeclared war between the progressives and the conservatives in the US taking place.

I wasn’t going to write anything about this, but today I couldn’t advance at all in my thesis work, I basically spend the day looking for opportunities past the master’s, and somehow I managed to stress over everything around me with out any reason. It was just weird.

Today, when I was looking for research openings in Germany, the US, and France, I was very anxious realizing that maybe I don’t have what it takes to be a researcher. After all these years I am yet to develop that reflex on analysis or code. And while this is true for some part, I think its just a way for the anxious monkey in my brain to stay worried, because at the end no matter what amount of knowledge I have at a given point its never enough to get to the next level of mastery. I should keep doing what I have always done, pursuing knowledge, reading, writing, and coding everyday.

Perseverance beats talent. consistency beats intelligence, and self awareness beats recognition from others.

The results of the years I spent nerding my way through every subject are not lost, I am not seeing them because at each step I upgrade my skills and awareness I go on to the next challenge. Yes I am lazy, that’s why I sacrificed my social contacts with my family and friends to be able to actually do this.

Now, even though I have fostered a very useful set of tools and skills in the previous years, which were backed up by the research curse that I’ve got this year, my work is yet far from being over. I need not to rest, I need not to quit, I need not to compare myself neither with my peers neither with myself at different moments in my life. Rather I need to focus on the present moment, the opportunities that the “now” got for me. And the “now” is no other than my thesis, the longest document I have written, and the best thing that ever happened to me.

You are close, Hsin, hang in there.

Time is not only a scarce resource of which each individual possess limited amount, its also multidimensional, i.e: there is always a better, more efficient activity that can be done instead of the one actually done. In fact, if we adopt this assumption, it renders most of our lives, if not all of it, inefficient, or rather, wasted. This is a terrifying idea.

In average we spend one third of our lives sleeping. Therefore, we can only optimize two thirds of our lives to be well invested time-wise. Hence, the problem here is not what part to optimize of your life, or why, or when? But rather, How?

Moreover, the subject of time is beyond the individual scope, but rather a universal one. In the movie Lucy, Scarlett Johansson, summarized the entire knowledge of the human race in one quote, by relating the legitimacy of any event to time. Indeed, “The only unit of measure is time”. In contrast however, we can’t really describe what time actually is.

Humanity have created some tools in a quest to model and measure time. These tools took various forms throughout history, most of which are inspired by natural or religious events. However, in an era characterized by increased speed, tremendous complexity and competition, as well as a free flow of huge amount of data, information and human-threatening artificial intelligence, are the current forms of time measurement tools still relevant? Can we really rely on them to model, allocate, and measure our time efficiently? Is there another form, or model, that can allow us to measure time in a more relevant and coherent manner?

Unfortunately, beside few trials from some scientists, and private companies here and there there is no serious debate that has been adopted in order to answer the questions above. We need, more than ever, to think this through on an international level and actually predict the outcome that such a change can bring to the world.

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I started thinking about why would I think about such a character. Is it my brain endorsing the ruthlessness of Fing that gets the job done? Is it me freaking out of the current situation in my country and realizing I should become a drug lord myself? I couldn’t really tell what’s going on.

I started writing this post right after that happened, but I really couldn’t figure I should have wrote about. Until a heated conversation I had with my father this morning about the economy. He started adopting my fears(or rather my paranoia) from years before about a storming financial crisis in Tunisia, he also described some terrible, terrible pictures about the possible outcomes. Frankly I got a little uncomfortable, and maybe triggered. What’s worse for a student than to graduate in the midst of a financial crisis. With this in mind I decided to write something about this conversation, like a wake up call or something, and I saw the little paragraph about Gus Fing. Then I realized I shouldn’t really do such thing.

Life is simple(in its meaninglessness), its pure pain and suffering even at its most joyful and comfortable moments. It wouldn’t really change much if you think about the coming financial crisis. My family survived through tough times before, and we will do it again if we have to. People will suffer and die, that’s what always happens, that’s what life is about, which renders caring much about the rest of the world(at least people beyond close friends and family), a very irrational thing to do. We don’t need more misery than what we already got. So as Rick said to Morty after they buried themselves from another dimension : “Don’t think about it”.

It is easier said than done though, especially when I quote a cartoon character to bring up a point. Still, the main idea here is that worrying about the uncertain, or the certain is irrational. Thinking about it, and preparing to minimize the amount of shit you take, is another matter. At the end of the day, the anxious monkey inside our heads, or at least mine, feeds from the constant worrying about things. The only way to starve him to death is to simply give in to the meaninglessness of the worst outcome possible, as you know he likes it when it matters. Bitch, nothing matters.

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Azzen’s absence in medium, did not prevent me from thinking about my next job, my independence and financial stability, and more importantly about my skill set and the things I need to learn to simply not survive, but rather, live. Going from not caring at all, to being 100% responsible for your life is an overwhelming idea, especially when the basic axis behind it is financial stability. Nevertheless, In a country characterized by a deformed labor market, a structurally paralyzed economy, and in the context of world wide recession, financial stability is out of reach.

Financial stability is usually related to having a job, which means being a slave to an entity for some wage in order to be able to survive. However, surviving will be such a burden for anyone, that they will barely be able to invest themselves in what actually can produce wealth : Knowledge and Skill. Therefore, with my utter refusal to become a wage boomer, being self employed arises as a possible alternative. However this approach, requires an initial investment, or rather, some sort of a comfortable financial situation that allows me to orient the necessary time and energy to the knowledge and skill in question. Hence, the universal basic income.

The brave idea behind the universal basic income, is that it is an opposite representation to the wage system. In one hand, the wage system starts by draining you from time and skill in return to a remuneration that will barely allows you to survive rather than live. While in the other hand the universal basic income starts by given you the financial means necessary to be active and hopefully invest your time and skill to create even more wealth for the collective welfare. However, the intriguing point is not about whether a basic income is fair or not, but rather, how universal should it be?

In summary, escaping the wage system, and the social prison that it represents is an overwhelming idea in spite of the obvious factors that makes it almost obsolete in our time. Those factors are mainly related to the intense globalization, the technological advancement, and the open access to knowledge and skill. In my case, this is overwhelming to realize, because the hardest part is to start, and frankly who knows if I really have to what it takes to actually make it without the herd.

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