Slave of my words

Nobody will be surprised if, at this point in time, after almost 140 posts on this blog, I confess that I like writing. And writing general content pieces like the ones I post here combines three of my passions: imagination, deep thinking and story telling. On the one hand, I have to find a different subject every day, something remarkable, surprising, outrageous, delightful, something worth sharing. Then I have to look for an interesting approach to the matter, including side stories, supporting material, documentation, and even an idea for the kind of stock photo that would be nice to illustrate the piece. Finally I have to weave all these elements together in a text that makes sense as a whole.

It is remarkable that, even if I enjoy the physical act of writing (or typing, which is much more frequent these days) I do not shy away from building the stories on the go, over a cup of coffee or in front of a live audience. During my college years, my dorm mates nicknamed me "Storyteller" not because I invented tales (i.e. told lies) but because every time anyone would indulge me I enjoyed creating rich narratives around the subject at hand. Admittedly, it was time consuming for my listeners and quite exhausting for me, but it was great fun.

Photo: Travis

Over time my interests have also grown wider: when I left my home at age 18 I was a hardcore technocrat, but through the years at university and later in the job I have found a new interest in understanding people and groups of people, because life in isolation is (as we have seen thanks to the pandemic) very sad. So now, besides my professional duties operating space instrument, I also spend a fair amount of time in what once were called "social sciences", including psychology, sociology, economics, ethnography, history, linguistics, and also in some related fields such as philosophy and evolutionary biology. I have finally understood that the only hope to make things better is understanding how things are and why they are that way, so now I put a lot of effort in investigating what happens to people and why, what moves them to do or not to do certain things, how they change over time, how the culture evolves, why different countries share some similarities but are different in others aspects. And sharing these discoveries with you is very exciting, even if my readership is still very short.

One thing that I have just realized is that I enjoy this time of writing so much, that it is growing slowly but certainly. I have had this impression for a few weeks now, but I wanted to make sure of it, so I plotted the length of my post and I could easily confirm that, while in August 2020 I typed around 500 words per day, yesterday's post was 1139, with some weeks averaging around 800 words per day. I do not know exactly why I do it, but you can stay assure that the time I devote to it is very pleasant. 

It is possible that one day it will become a burden and then I will prefer to be again king of my silence instead of a slave of my words, but in the meantime I plan to continue conveying the best of my fingers onto the net. I hope you tag along willingly and enjoy it as well. Have a nice evening.