The QuaranTEENS

Last week I started to really keep my phone away, like I never did since I got my first phone. It was hard the first couple of days, in a way, but then it got pretty easy. Of course I couldn’t keep every digital technology away. I’m especially talking about my computer, but as I might have said earlier, I mostly use my laptop for homework, projects and stuff that don’t imply social medias, or games (I don’t really play videos games for that matter). Though it’s a little difficult sometimes (especially because there are some close friends that I would like to talk to or stuff that I sometimes need and can’t get on my laptop such as my iCloud mails or the iOS app called “Books”), it has already brought me some very positive “feedback”. As an example, I don’t spend half the morning on my phone in bed checking Instagram, Snapchat, etc. I also bought an alarm in order for me not to have to use my phone, and wake up fast. I also got used to getting to work more easily. What’s a little weird is that I used to be on my phone all the time and days would just fly by, and I would just ask myself how time could go by so fast just by spending it on a phone. It’s a good thing that I am doing this because now I know where to find the time I need to do things that matter.

I really think it’s a good thing if you want to try that. It really stimulates your brain and you really get to enjoy your free time. For example, even though I didn’t really try it yet, I do think that conscious thinking is the best way of spending your time.

Brahms.

Since the beginning of the digital era, many people were scared of technology’s influence on our daily lives. Especially with the creation of more and more addictive smartphones. Of course, it’s not only the smartphones themselves that are being criticised, it’s also social media, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, videos games and other addictive content easily accessible on the web. But is it really true? Well, many studies on that particular subject were published saying they are, and of course, I relate enormously to that problem. Let me tell you why:

I realised, maybe just in time, that I really spent to much time on my phone (and I’m just about certain that more than 40% of the people reading this can also relate to that “obsession”) and especially too much time on social media, seeking for new content, whether it be memes, math problems or physics facts for example. I also had to know how much time I spent on my phone per day, per month, over a year. And I realised that this was enough. I figured I spent approximately 2 days and a half per week on my phone. Over a year, that would mean living less than 261 days in a year instead of the usual 365. I know what you might be thinking “Yes, but you realise we have been confined for almost 2 months and can only get that data from the last month”, but this is just a sort of excuse that may make you feel like it’s worth it to spend that much time on a incredible, yet very addictive device. Last week, I spent a total of 61h on my phone, meaning approximately 8h42 per day, somedays reaching a total of 13h!

Now, it’s too soon to say whether I will considerably reduce my screen time, and if I’m going to keep that promise to myself, but for a few days, I’m trying to reduce it as much as I can. I went from almost 9 hours to 1h36 this Friday (that was my lowest), then Thursday, Saturday and today (Sunday) were about 4 or 5 hours. In order for me to achieve this, I try to read or to work. I am not used to reading books. But know I think I understand how much they bring, what real value they have. I tend to imagine a book like a box that either has lots of information, that you can grab when opening it, or a whole world of imagination spreading in the room as if I already were in a dream. But that’s just how I got started with reading. I have other books (that I need) to read. By the way, I have never read any book written in English until now. This book is called “The Magic of Thinking Big” written by Dr.David Schwartz (it’s a motivational book, and it does work!). What’s even better is that fortunately for me, I really start to enjoy reading! (even if it’s just one book over more than a year, I have already read books for pleasure before, just to let you know that I already knew what reading a book for pleasure is 😂).

What books would you recommend me to read?

Brahms

It is sometimes difficult to see how time goes by faster an faster. I don’t remember a lot from my early ages, until I was like 11. Some people say that being a child, days are short but on a greater scale, it feels like “eternity”. And that growing up, you realise how time is “accelerating”. I don’t really see it myself, although I think I understand why we slowly start to understand that time goes fast: it’s just that you get to understand time better. Each year you live, you (un)consciously tell yourself “it’s just another year to live”. And you think or maybe have this idea of life where you start only by learning a lot, then you’re just dropped into the active life, with the same routine, going to work everyday, coming back, making dinner and going to bed and so you are just waiting for things to happen (that’s how it feels to me for now anyway). Put some spices in your life!

So, if you think that time is going faster than some time ago, how do we try to manage our time, or even try to slow it down? First, time, if you’re not eternal, has a value. So for example if you have any projects, accomplish them. And if you have none, make a list of things you could do on the long run. Things that matter to you. Examples: learn a new language, a discipline, a science or learning how to cook.

For the most ambitious ones, why not try to plan your life on a decade or more. Think of an ideal job, leisures, where you think you’d want to live, and what kind of big life projects you’ll want to pursue etc.

I realise some of you might be thinking that some of what I say is a little “too much”; but I like telling what I think, and this quarantine blog was really a place where I felt “free” to say what was on my mind and that I wanted to tell when I had the occasion. Thank you for this opportunity of showing how I think to myself and others!

Brahms

Good afternoon. Today I just wanted to ask you what were your plans for the future: studies, professional life, personal things you think you could and maybe will improve. Concerning studies, I am 99.9% sure I’m going to do a CPGE (Classe Préparatoire aux Grandes Écoles or 2-3 relatively hard years before going to an engineering school) and then an engineering school where I would like to study electronics, mainly. Then, I guess apply for an electronician’s or electronic engineer’s job and a few years later create my own startup that I have been thinking about for years, which will be about R&D, innovation and many projects. I hope, like anyone else I guess, to succeed as much as I can.

For now, Parcoursup is very stressful. Not only for the students, but apparently for mothers (if I’m living it, anyone might as well be living with it too), brothers, sisters, fathers etc. I actually know exactly that I wanted to do a CPGE, and initially my mother said “ok”, at least she agreed. But 3 days before I clicked on the “confirm” button for the admission proposition for I wanted, she started going MENTAL (which is common, but she never gets as angry as she was this time) because I had 2 choices: CPGE, or a course a school proposed that clearly had hundreds of advantages over CPGE. No one understood why I wanted CPGE more than the other choice, it wasn’t totally clear to me either. But I chose want I wanted to do anyway, and my mother’s reaction to that was not as bad as I thought it would be.

Anyway, how about leaving a comment about what you want to do for studies, in your professional life, when you think you’re going to buy in your own place, how it would look like, etc. I mean just tell your life plans and projects!

See you soon!

Brahms

I’ve just watched a few videos about how to get motivated to do hard work, which is usually a synonym of “being productive”.

These videos tell you that in the modern world and the modern society, you get used doing simple things that get your brain to produce dopamine, which gives you some kind(s) of pleasure(s). But this is just like a drug (which does, too, produce dopamine). It becomes your “new normal of satisfaction” and becomes a habit. So you don’t feel anything after doing that thing after a little while. But when you suddenly try to stop doing it because you think it’s a waste of your time, you can feel reeeaaallly unmotivated, not wanting to do many things that could change your day by making it extremely productive.

So basically, these things that might make you feel good for a little while and then make you feel really lazy or uncomfortable are: scrolling down on social media, watching tv (entertainment not really the news), watching online pornography (just a fact, go check on the internet if you don’t believe me), and other instant pleasures. You might think of a few more I could think of, but maybe you understand what it is about. It’s something that you do, or consume for the 100th time, not because it’s exciting anymore, but because you need it. This video told me that if you check social medias all the time, it could be for a lot of reasons, but one of them would be expecting a notification, because we got used to it, and it is the thing about social media that gives you pleasure (aka someone carres about you, what you said, did, or commented on).

So if you’re willing to get more productive by avoiding spending all your time on your phone, on your instagram account, going everyday to McDonald’s or KFC etc. I think you should read the following instructions:

-First start with one day of the week when you prepared what you had to do during the eve on a piece of paper, so that you don’t have to look at your phone every once in a while and get attracted by Facebook originally willing to just check what you need to do.

-Slowly rise the amount of days. Start with one for 2-3 weeks, then add 1 for 2 weeks, then do this 3, 4, 5 days a week until you’re unable to do the work without checking for so long what to do.

-During these special days, do the boring productive things, read books, play chess, read even more, work on a project, build things, do math, write poems, essays. After a while, I promise you’ll satisfy your brain by doing that. This isn’t what you’ll like to do at first. But when you feel at ease doing it, you might realise how interesting it is, how useful it can be.

And the VERY FEW DAYS when you’ll try yourself to video games, to social media, tv, I guarantee you that it WON’T FEEL THE SAME AT ALL. I haven’t tried it, but it’s worth the time. Free yourself from dopamine.

Brahms.

Today is Brahms’ 187th birthday (Johannes Brahms is not a random pseudonym for my account…). Johannes Brahms was a german composer, and even though I don’t know many of his works and chose his name pretty randomly, I do like the most famous ones: The 3rd movement of his 3rd symphony, Hungarian Dance n5 (I don’t know any other pieces from him anyway 😳😅). I also only knew about today’s event because of Steinway & Sons’ instagram account (Steinway is for sure the most well know piano brand in the world), sorry I don’t have an infinite memory to remember every composer’s birthday 😆.

I would like to talk about instrumental music from before the 20th century. I think that the popularity of “classical music” (wrongly used by some people to describe any music that isn’t rap, jazz, pop, funk, slam, etc.) among teenagers and young adults was really at its lowest point between 1970 and 2010. But it seems to be now slowly going up again.

I would like to tell all of you, reading this, that “classical music” (which is actually composed of various other genres of music: Baroque, Classic, Romantique, Opera, atonal, serial and many others) is not as boring as your memories tell you. And I think that in general, films by telling you it’s boring, sometimes; and pop music or rap for example because it’s very different, make you feel somehow uncomfortable. But maybe each one of you should really feel the music you’re listening to and try yourself to classical music, feel the emotions it’s creating and trying to share.
So please tell me in the comments if you like “Classical music” or not and if you don’t, are you willing to try it?

Brahms.

It isn’t always a piece of cake to find a suitable subject to develop when you have to write a post on QuaranTEENS… I didn’t even know what I was going to say a few seconds ago.
But I’m here to help you with this even though I am not the best at writing.
There are many things you can talk about during quarantine, but there are pretty original ones and the ones you choose by default. For instance, telling us how your week was is good, but it feels like it could use a little originality.

I might have a few examples of original subjects: you could talk about a brand new hobby, create yourself a hobby to talk about, and even try to guide everyone to find new hobbies. You could also do DIY articles in order to share your technique and knowledge. You could also talk about the situation of the world and/or of the country and about what you think is going to happen next. For that, many different versions of it exist.

For what’s less original, without wanting to disappoint anybody, telling how your day, your week or how life is during confinement, except if your contracted the COVID-19 or any other virus, is pretty frequently seen. It’s a shame that it isn’t Saturday night yet, I could’ve had the Saturday night fever, and luckily it would go away haha.

I hope y’all feelin’ ok 🤭😆, have a good evening!

Brahms

Lockdown is a great time (subjectively) for personal improvement. There are a few aspects about yourself, whoever you are, that you could develop. It could either result in new points of view, in effectiveness, in your usual mood, your self-confidence, or even how interested you are about certain subjects.

Creativity is one of those aspects you could develop, it’s also one of the numerous things you can always improve. What are the outcomes, the aftermath? You would be able to express yourself through arts or in your imagination, with specific and accurate representations of how you feel and what you’d want to show or communicate. Sometimes, we need to express how we feel in order to get rid of that feeling if it’s a poisonous one, or to enhance it if you want more!

As you can see, you couldn’t lose anything doing that, not even your time, even if you wanted to.

Explaining what good you get out of it is cute, but how could you actually do it?
First of all, creativity is a matter of imagination. Einstein once said “Logic will take you from A to B, imagination will take you everywhere” (it could be taken as an explanation of quantum physics, space-time continuum or the infinite number of possible outcomes and dimensions). The brilliant scientist (but definitely not my favourite) also said “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”. What this means is that knowledge is a cool way to show off how much you know and help your logic mind to find solutions. But imagination, if you spend enough time using it, you’ll develop it, you’ll be able to create things no one has ever thought of to this day. You might even get an eidetic memory. To this day, I have never heard of a such cool memory. An eidetic memory gives you the ability to picture what you are currently thinking about, in 3D (just like holograms!). You could picture anything, momentarily modify the surrounding space, objects, EVEN RECREATE AN ENTIRE CINEMA AND WATCH A FULL MOVIE! You could also add yourself to it (eidetic memory reproduces every single detail possible). It’s pretty cool, although I haven’t even talked about how to develop that thing.

I think that after having started to master your imagination and maybe found out how to get closer to an eidetic memory, you could do layouts of things you imagine (for better results you might want to get the right dimensions and proportions, try taking mesures with the model you have in your mind when you control it well). As an example, you could make layouts of buildings, or a layout of a hypercube would be cool too (haha just kidding it’s impossible, click here to see what it is). You could also compose music if you know how to, and if you don’t, try learning it. You could draw, you could paint, you could listen to music while creating a new world in your mind (I recommend listening to Rachmaninov’s 2nd piano concerto, it’s really awesome). You could write, like in a diary or a notebook, or you could dance, sing, even try new recipes to cook! You could also learn new languages (I have been learning Italian for a few days now). Finally, even if it’s not the best thing for your eyes, I think that Virtual Reality is a good way to develop creativity.

As you can see, there are a lot of ways to get to develop your creativity, I think it’s worth it! You should try it sometime!

Brahms

Hi everyone, I should not be writing right now, since I’m 1 second to falling asleep. There is another good reason for that: I might just write how I feel about how I fail in most of the things I really like because generally, at that time of the night, every feeling that I have about myself is boosted times 100. I realise that this website is not a diary and that there is almost 40 people who are going to read this, but since I need to share how I’m feeling during lockdown sometimes, it’s a perfect opportunity.

It’s perfectly normal to feel a little depressed about something from time to time, especially if something really sad happened not so long ago in your life. In my case, nothing in particular happened to me lately. I think that when you give your best at something you really feel is going to turn out just fine, and doesn’t, you kind of want to abandon it totally… For example, when you have a passion like physics, generally understand most of what you’re learning of just reading; but then, the teacher introduces a new concept and you feel like you’re the only one to not understand it and the teacher won’t care whether you get it or not, and you can’t find any complementary information to help you out, some people would feel useless, completely dumb and that they suck at it. It’s like that one second, that one glitch that makes you feel like a tiny rock being thrown into a really, really deep well by a normal kid.

Let me tell you something, I might be thinking this as I am writing, but that kid, is your mind. It’s called pessimism and I really don’t like it if you know what I mean! It kind of gets me EVERYTIME to be honest. As an example, I have been playing the piano for 3 years and a half, on my own, but really often, I end up thinking “I suuuuuuck, why did I even put my fingers on these keys years ago?!” right after having thrown all my anger on my innocent keyboard.

You know what? This week, I built a grand piano shell for my synthesiser made exclusively out of cardboard, unfortunately, making it in only 3 to 4 days didn’t even make me proud of my creation, even though it’s just as I imagined it and stand pretty still (it also takes 1/4 of the remaining space in my bedroom). Now I’m not really telling a magical way to become satisfied with yourself and with what you do because it’s the most difficult thing to do for me but I know that 50% of the time, when my self-confidence is super low, it’s mostly because I’m tired and that in this state, finding a solution to what I’m doing is absolutely impossible. So just…chill out, go to bed, go eat a little, drink something refreshing, to get energetic and good enough to get back to what you were doing. As I said, I works, sometimes… Actually confinement slowly makes me realise how important sleep is. I think I should go to bed by the way.

One last little comment on my usual behaviour… I know you might sometimes feel like I’m looking down on other students or on you, and I’m really sorry for that. I actually don’t know why I do that, I even look down on myself ALL THE TIME and I don’t like it… I really want to change the way I’m acting in public, in class with everyone…but the thing is that I have no idea what I could start with…it’s all blur in my head, who I think I am for example. I’m basically always asking the same friends to help me because I feel like they are the kind of people to solve personal issues haha. Anyway, I have some time to work on myself so I think I could try!

P.S.: This post is clearly not as great as the previous ones but it’s late so good night everyone!

Brahms

Sean lives alone in a very isolated part of Northern Ireland. He lost his wife 4 years ago. Here is a letter found in a thick book.

“I don’t really know what to say…Actually, I don’t have much time. I just have been procrastinating all week…and last week too by the way… so right now I have a lot of work to do, I really hoped I could finish all the work I have for this week to catch up a little but… I’m up since 8 a.m. and have already seen the Sun rise high up, and he’s already gone.

I am starting to wonder why I’m writing this, it seems so pathetic, but it’s been almost three months since we’re in lockdown. If you haven’t heard of the “Crownvirus” as I call it (or Coronavirus as sociable people say), even if you were born (or will be born) in 2050, you literally live under a rock. Even I live right behind a hill, no one can see where I live but I still manage to get the newspaper. I don’t know why I even bought this small sheet of paper. I guess I was just worried of having no one to talk to.
I haven’t been out for 3 weeks already but I do have what I need to live. I am worried about my son and his wife, they haven’t been calling for a month… They must have forgotten about me, but I prefer to think that they did, rather than thinking they caught it. In 64 years of career, I’ve never stopped working, I’ve always been really invested in what I do. But I just can’t do it anymore, I am getting a bit tired… It might be, being a civil engineer, because I was always out to see how the foundations and orientation of the buildings I designed were respected.

I’ve been listening to a lot of classical music lately. As I lost the ability to speak when I was 20 years old and music was the only thing I wanted to communicate with when I was with my wife. For now, my love is resting elsewhere, I hope to see her smile again soon enough. I used to talk to her through the beats and rithms of music. She used to answer with a waltz in the garden, it would always make me feel lighter than the thin breeze that went through her hair. I can still smell the sweet almond lotion she always used.

As I said, I don’t have much time, to join my wife.”

Had the man been “crowned”?

A couple of hours later, Sean would finally talk…to a dusty and fragile chair:

I’m sorry, if only I had called you once…

Tell Mum I love her.

Love you Dad.

Brahms