I posted a while back that the most enjoyable thing about writing down stuff that happens to you is that you record the pointless minutiae of daily life that, with no reason in particular to stick in your mind, you quickly forget. Reading back those details takes you right back to that moment you sat and wrote those thoughts.
This was the end to which I instituted my Little Red Notebook, which I have been dreadfully amiss in consigning my thoughts to. The last entry is May 13th, and the one before that is April 4th.
Anyways, what I wanted to record before it’s inexorably lost to the entropies of my mind is that before my exams I’d go to the lobby of the Blackett lab and revise and end up talking to other first year physicists who normally I wouldn’t talk to at all. I don’t even know their names, but we were in this exam-mess all together all the same. Made me wish that on the whole people were more generally social; the herding instinct is terribly old, and the symptoms of it are plain for all to see.
Human beings instinctively form the in-groups and the out-groups, dividing down lines of common interests or thoughts, of common experience. Once you lose touch with a group it’s hard to find your way back in, and it’s definitely hard to break into a group unless you already know someone on the inside. And there’s the risk of ending up in an awful limbo where you’re not really a part of any group, sitting painfully at the fringes. Of course, you also get their logical opposites, the social spiders, sitting at the centre of a vast web of connections.
It’s kinda depressing in a way that we all end up playing this ridiculous game, no matter how stupid we all realise it is.
