Two people today asked me the same question – So what do you really want to do?. One told me to to think really hard about what I want to achieve in life and then work backwards from there. The other told me to stop trying to think about this since it doesn’t get you anywhere but more stressed out and depressed. The difference was the the person who said the later is my age and the person who said the first is someone who has been lucky to have seen a lot more of life.

Both the conversations reminded me of another conversation I had with someone once – and the question I was asked then, or rather the exercise I was asked to perform then, is one that I have not had the courage to do yet. The exercise was to pick the 4 most important people in your life or 4 people from different aspects of your life, for instance your mother, your best friend, your colleague and your teacher (Imay have some of these mixed up, it’s been a while). And assume that you die tomorrow, what would you want each of these people to say about you in your eulogy? This may sound simple, but to do it in earnest it is an exercise which is definitely not easy and to a large exten scary. Because this is just another way of figuring out what you want to do in life and what you want to accomplish.

Does anyone really know what they want to do? Isn’t that the question that humans have been asking them since the dawn of the human race? Aren’t they always looking for a meaning and a purpose? And if that is so, then wouldn’t looking for an answer to that question simply be a way of deluding myself into believing that for some odd reason I am different that or better than the billions of people that have come before me? If all the brilliant minds that have existed in history till today couldn’t find the answer to that question, then I really have no delusions of being able to find the answer to that question either.

When I say great minds I mean people like Feynman, Einstein, Galileo, Newton, Edison, Bell, Ford and all the others who I hold in high regard — people who have been instrumental in causing fundamental change. Change which didn’t just do something “better”, but made a profound impact on how welive, what we do, how we think.

Jack asked me today as to if that is what I want to do then why not consider changing the way people think and behave towards other people. To help people in thinking clearly so that we don’t have things like debacle of September 11th. My initial response to him was that I can’t do that because I have no idea how to even go about achieving such a goal which just seems so futile. Because the human mind is too susceptible to the very thing I am writing about – the search for meaning. Some like Feynman (and I hope I am included in that minority group) can only get as far as admiting that we simply do not know. And the realization that we do not know is adequate to propel us further. Others, fall back to believing things which may or may not stem from a sound basis – the extreme case being those who were “on a mission of martyrdom” and will “go to the kingdom of heaven with 70 virgins” or some crap like that by manuervering commercial jets into buildings and killing innocent people.

It’s a very odd world. We live in the future… and even though I might say that I cannot get myself to change it — or at least I haven’t been able to yet. The future is always better. In the future we will be happy. In the future the world will be a better place. But the future is just that. It is always the future. The future never comes. The future is a always yet to come. And probably when it’s too late, we realize that we screwed it all up. What’s that saying — If I knew what I know now when I was born I would live life differently or something along those lines?

I feel like a hypocrit. Because, as always, it is easier to preach, than to practice. People need to learn to be “selfish”. And by selfish, I do not mean greedy in a monetary sense at all. I mean selfish from a point of view of figuring out what is the best way for one to lead his or her life by doing what makes you happy. I don’t know what that is and I don’t know how to do it and hence the sense of hypocrisy.

So what do I really want to do? I honestly have no idea. And my solution to it thus far has been to get my thrills by picking the smaller battles that I know how to win. By breaking down the problem in to smaller more manageable pieces. But in doing so am I simply delaying the inevitable question of looking at the bigger picture? Is there a bigger picture?

I was very young when I read myfirst book by Richard P. Feynman. It was ‘Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!’ : Adventures of a Curious Character. And I think it was then that I was hooked. When I heard that Richard P. Feynman passed away, I was truly disappointed… because he would have been the person I would have loved to meet in person. Unfortunately, I cannot claim to understand the intricacies of the hard core Quantum Electrodynamics theory proposed by Feynman, but reading about his opinions, his way of life and his actions leaves me in awe.

Among the other Feynman books that I have read (some which I’m still in the process of reading…) are What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character, Meaning of It All : Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist, Six Not-So-Easy Pieces : Einstein’s Relativity, Symmetry and Space-Time and the one which I’m currently reading – The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman.

One of the short works by Feynman in the latter book is titled The Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society. As I read this section, it truly gave me the motivation to write a blog entry about it — after a fairly long time. Why? Because Feynman asks such pertinent questions and makes such remarks which I feel should be pre-requisite reading for any person who considers himself or herself to have an iota of scientific thinking. If I could I would replicate the entire work here in this blog, but though I’m sure Feynman wouldn’t mind, the publishers of his book would probably not like me very much for it. So I will post a few key excerpts from it and highly recommend that you get the book to read the full section. Note: This lecture was given in 1964, for someone to have this much insight and applicability to the world even as it stands today truly marks Feynman as a visionary. (But please, don’t try and equate his ability to think ahead be it in the context of society, computing, nanotechnology or physics with that of the like of Nostradamus… that would be an insult to the memory and the contribution of Feynman to the world).

“… I believe that one of the greatest dangers to modern society is the possible resurgence and expansion of ideas of thought control; such ideas as Hitler had, or Stalin in his time, or th Catholic religion in the Middle Ages, or the Chinese today. I think that one of the greatest dangers is that this shall increase until it encompasses all of the world”

“And now finally, as I’d like to show Galileo our world, I must show him something with a great deal of shame. If we look away from the science and look at he world around us, we find out something rather pitiful: the the environment that we live in is so actively, intnsely unscientific. Galileo could say: “I noticed that Jupiter was a ball with moons and not a god in the sky. Tell me, what happened to all the astrologers?” Well, they print their results in the newspapers, in the United States at least, in every daily paper every day. Why do we still have astrologers?”

Feynman goes on to talk about a lot of different ways in which modern society is highly unscientific and irrational. But I will let you go read Feynman’s views directly — because as hey made me think of thinks, they may make you think of things as well.

I’ve always argued with my mother from an early age about religion, beliefs and tradition, because to me, none of it makes much sense. It lacks sensibility and therefore, I should not need to adhere to it. One of my friends parents were talking to me about being more “tolerant” going along with it if it makes someone happy. But I cannot accept that either. That is about the same as saying follow the pied piper simply because everyone else does. Gandhi said “Be the change that you want to see in the world.” So does that not mean that those of us who are willing to question the norm and seek to bring about a change in the hackneyed belief systems of religion, belief and tradition have to have the courage and the conviction to stand up and “be the change we want to see in the world.” Yes, it may be a losing batter or even a Pyrrhic (that’s my new favorite word of the day) victory at the cost of the happiness of those close to you who believe, but someone has to stand up and make people think…