Time, Reckoning and Nostalgia

I've been thinking about how long it takes for an experience—say, saying something foolish at a party and making everyone cringe—to ripen into nostalgia. For me, the threshold seems to hover at around five years. I’m twenty-nine now, in 2025, and nothing about 2024, 2023, 2022, or even 2021 tugs at any sentimental thread. Those years still feel too close, too loud, still humming with the static of embarrassment.

But something shifts when I look back to 2020, 2019, 2018, and farther still—to 1999, where my earliest memories lie in the deepest chambers of my mind like faded cave paintings. It makes me wonder whether nostalgia is not simply an effect of passing time but a marker of internal distance: a sign that I’ve crossed some inner border and become someone unfamiliar to the person who lived those early chapters.

Just as I remember events, I also remember a sense of who I was—a certain quality of self-consciousness, a distinct feeling of inhabiting my own Cartesian theatre rather than anyone else’s. Cartesian theatre is a term attributed to René Descartes to describe the experience of self-awareness. The theatres an individual inhabits seem singular and unique at any given moment, yet in memory they appear as fossilised remains—many such theatres, disjointed and scattered across the life lived so far. Only after enough time has passed do these distinct theatres recede from one another, far enough to be regarded with nostalgia

The meaning of life is therefore specific to the theatre that is currently “playing” on the present stage of my life, and whatever brings joy to that particular theatre is the meaning of life for it. A different theatre may have a different definition of that meaning. In my early youth, my Cartesian theatre centred entirely on learning new physics concepts, exercising new mathematical skills, proving theorems, and daydreaming about the universe. In my present phase, it is much wider, and it includes science, stories, women, friendships, and even day-to-day existence.

I’ve started calling these past segments or theatres “ghosts”: discrete, finite, enumerable chapters of my identity that linger like the afterimages of selves long expired.

If anything defines who I am, it is the patterning of my thought—the way one thought strikes another, the idiosyncratic way they raise or suppress certain emotions in response to the world. We all recoil in the same way when we stub a toe on a doorframe, but the mind’s response to an unexpected question from a stranger is something else entirely: a private signature, a distinctive reflex of personality.

Revisiting the Ghosts

I felt compelled to write all this down to better understand what it feels like to observe—from a long distance—the various ghosts that once inhabited my body. In adulthood, I can trace three broad patterns of thought, three phases of mind: one from about ages seventeen to twenty-five, another from twenty-five to twenty-eight or twenty-nine, and a third beginning now, at twenty-nine. Each phase marks a shift along two dimensions: how I understood myself and how I moved among other people.

Why do these transitions happen? Are they the inevitable metamorphoses of a person in their twenties? Were they a COVID-era social trigger? Or were they transformations born from shifting preferences combined with the slow disillusionment of academic life? I’m not sure.

What I do know is that the first phase of my inner life was self-centred, fussy, socially unnatural, infused with a dramatic sense of “why am I here on this planet?”, and yet simultaneously arrogant, proud, detached from reality, afraid, and overly tethered to my parents. At the same time, this ghost brimmed with ideals, ambitions, and competitive fire. Pleasant? Hardly. But undeniably alive.

That was a phase when I believed that my “sense of purpose”—my reason for being here—was something I was born with, not something I merely chose from among the many possibilities available to me.

I remember many late nights, after everyone else was asleep, staring at the stars through my cramped dormitory window, books scattered around me, sometimes until dawn. I was mesmerised by the elegance of the simple principles that move the universe—and by the miracle that the human mind could comprehend them at all. The lives of the great thinkers of science—their solitude, their fierce devotion to truth—seemed to me the highest calling. I even embraced a kind of youthful celibacy, believing that the pure pursuit of knowledge demanded such single-mindedness. I was attracted to girls, but I felt it was a distraction, and I wilfully ignored any possibility of romance, restricting my interactions with the opposite sex to logistics and transactions.

The second phase was a confused ghost: trying on a parade of transient identities, none of which fit for longer than a season.

This was when I began to see, with painful clarity, the mismatch between the academic life I had imagined and the one that actually existed. The issues weren’t about reasoning—everyone agrees on rigour—but about authority. Who decides what questions I may ask? Who dictates the projects I am allowed to work on? The answers came from the quiet machinery of hierarchy.

I changed my academic advisers not once but three times—each change born of dissatisfaction with how they confined my mind. The pattern was the same: I would approach a potential adviser; they would give me papers to read; I would read them and propose the questions I wanted to pursue. They would disagree, calling them too ambitious, and instead suggest questions that felt either unoriginal—just publishable enough—or too speculative. Either way, my motivation evaporated.

Disillusioned—because I had once believed rigour guaranteed freedom—I realised I had been wrong. I could pursue only what I was permitted to pursue, often projects so mundane they dulled the edges of curiosity. A faint urge to reinvent myself began to take shape. I could join the practical world, find a stable path like everyone else, or continue living as the idealist I had been. The result was a four- to five-year period, from 2021 to 2025, marked by confusion and intellectual turbulence.

This was also the time when I drifted towards the arts, returned occasionally to my private physics obsessions, and wandered through projects assigned by academic seniors that led nowhere. I went from having never read a novel at twenty-five to having read so many that I lost count. I watched cinema from around the world and across decades. This was also when I first imagined becoming a writer—someone who could make a life through fiction. My twenty-two-year-old self would never have imagined my older self burning with the desire to produce poems and short stories.

After many storms, I seem to have entered a third phase—a steadier shape of self. I know who I am intellectually, and I know how I intend to use the abilities I have, regardless of circumstance: as a hybrid creature—part practical, part idealist—whose idealism no longer clings solely to physics but extends towards the arts as well. At the same time, I’ve become pragmatic. I now feel a clear calling: to make a living through teaching, in all its forms, and to let my creative and intellectual impulses breathe outside institutional constraints. I want peer review, not permission. I want curiosity, not grants or tenure. Research in the fundamental sciences, I think, should never become a job; it should remain an act of wonder.

In this third phase, the range of things and people I can appreciate has widened, and the kinds of things I can give back to others have widened as well. I no longer see my “purpose” as something pre-programmed into me at birth—I believe nobody’s is. We are all born blank, and we choose eventually, with the fullest conviction. We choose not because only we can do what we choose to do, but because somebody has to do what we choose to do.

And that fierce attachment to our purpose, though necessary if we are to make any contribution at all, should never be forgotten to be simply a fiction we believe with conviction. It is the story we want our life to add up to.

It is a fiction because, given different circumstances, we could have chosen something else. Anybody can choose anything, freely. I can imagine myself adopting many different purposes. I could pick up a guitar and find a home in music. I could study acting and enter the world of theatre. I could join an activist circle and become an advocate for a cause. I could devote myself to fiction and literature. I could even imagine becoming a farmer and finding community in a life close to the land.

I believe in human potential—my own included.

And fictions are malleable, modifiable, and rebuildable, even from scratch, in any form, at any time.

What makes our purpose truly our own is not any mythic, special connection of a “unique soul” to a particular calling, but the presence of absolute agency in each individual. No one can force a purpose on us, and no one can stop us from having the purpose we want to have.

Purpose matters only insofar as the activities it leads us to bring us joy in the moment—joy infused with so many other sources unrelated to that purpose. Purpose for its own sake, or worse, purpose pursued for material benefit beyond what is needed for a simple, comfortable living, does not matter.

Ghosts and Love

This brings me back to the thread I left earlier—the parallel metamorphoses in how I related to people, which unfolded alongside the intellectual ones.

Through my teens and early twenties, I built my identity around celibacy—believing, rather naïvely, that “truth-seekers” must renounce attachment. I carried a set of largely unexamined (and often unflattering) assumptions about women and relationships, inherited from a conservative, narcissistic, patriarchal upbringing that I no longer recognize as my own.

Around twenty-five, I decided to give romance a try—perhaps because solitude had started to feel hollow, or because my growing intellectual disillusionment made me question the cost of devoting myself to truth-seeking at the expense of everything else. Why sacrifice so much when the pursuit itself looked nothing like the romantic ideal I had imagined—and wasn’t even especially valued in the environment I occupied?

Thus began a second phase of my personal life, marked mostly by confusion. I quickly realized I understood almost nothing about love. Even from afar, it seemed mysterious—important in ways that had nothing to do with reproduction or utility. During those years, I was socially and romantically inexperienced: overthinking, overcorrecting, behaving in contrived and emotionally mismatched ways. And yes, I’ll admit it now—there were moments of entitlement.

That entitlement showed up in two forms. The obvious, invasive kind—the “others owe me reciprocity” version, which is as icky as it sounds. And the quieter, more evasive kind: pre-emptively shrinking my own expression of interest, desire, or perceived value before anyone else had the chance to exercise their free will. The second was more benign, perhaps—but also less courageous.

I often felt a disorienting sense of “What do I do next?” or “What do I say now?” when interacting with romantic interests. I didn’t realize then that there are no strict rules in romance—just as there aren’t in other organic human relationships, like friendship. What I actually needed was much simpler: first, to stay aware of my own moral integrity (and correct course when necessary), and second, to relax, enjoy life, and let things unfold.

I behave differently now. I like how I show up. I’ll probably still make mistakes—but I’m curious, and I’m still learning.

Opening myself to romance wasn’t an on/off switch, especially for someone who once viewed relationships in strictly utilitarian terms. It required a deep restructuring of my inner world—the part of my identity that governs how I position myself relative to others. Like my intellectual transformation, this one took years—four or five, almost exactly overlapping with the period during which my intellectual identity also transformed and stabilized. Either restructuring may still be incomplete, and that’s fine, so long as things are moving in the right direction, however slowly.

My past influences now echo like distant, fading howls. I feel at ease with people from all walks of life. In a way I never had before, I feel morally and existentially secure.

It strikes me that many personal transformations follow the same contour: you begin with misplaced confidence, lose it entirely, and eventually return to yourself—changed, forward-facing, and open-minded. My own journey seems to follow that pattern. I left who I was, wandered for years, and came back changed enough to recognize the distance from my past selves.