This is a story about simplicity...
A compressed spring is heavier than an uncompressed spring. When you lay down on your mattress, the springs of the mattress are actually getting heavier. When you get in your car, the springs of the suspension are getting heavier. When you wind up a clockwork watch, it weighs more. Wait, what?
Yes, it's as simple as I just said. When you squash a spring, the spring gets heavier. Any questions?
Probably just one: whaaaaat?
Well, it's because of E = mc² you see.
Oh, boring. It's one of Nick's crazy rants about physics. Perhaps he's gone nuts again. Perhaps he's having another hypomanic episode. Well, in some ways you're right. But before anybody shouts "BANANA" at me [it's my 'safe' word] you should really read on a little further.
The reason why I race off on those hypomanic episodes is that most of the time, some evil passenger in my car keeps putting the handbrake on. People keep climbing on my back and making me carry them. People keep putting rocks in my pockets and getting me to drag their shit along for them. I'm basically frustrated as hell the whole time at the endless monotonous boredom and not being able to get on with my projects because of absolute bullshit. I just like to work on things and finish them, you see. If you tell me that you need something building, I'll get on and build it, and give you a completed project, instead of sitting around with my head up my butt. I don't really like sitting around with my head up my butt. I like getting on and building shit.
And so, I become a compressed spring. The more that I'm held back, the more that I become coiled and squashed and full of energy, ready to spring forwards when I'm released. The time windows are very short, but I build a lot of cool stuff very quickly. I built iPhone apps that reached #1 in the charts in a matter of weeks. I built a gigantic summerhouse in my garden in the space of a few days. I don't generally fuck about.
"But why do springs get heavier when they're compressed, Nick?" I hear you ask. It's really easy to explain.
Energy and mass are equivalent. Therefore, if you apply a weight to the top of a spring, and it squashes down, the energy that is stored up in that spring is stored as mass. More mass means the spring is more heavy. When you take the weight off the spring, allowing it to uncompress, the mass is converted back into energy, and the spring gets lighter again.
That's all that the equation E = mc² really says. It says energy equals mass [times the speed of light squared]. Energy-mass equivalence.
OK... the speed of light squared is a pretty big number, so the amount of mass is pretty tiny compared to the amount of energy. So tiny that there isn't a set of scales accurate enough in the whole world to measure just how much heavier our spring got, when we compressed it. The amount of mass that we created from energy, by compressing the spring, was teeny tiny.
Equally though, you don't need to turn much mass into energy to create lots of energy.
When people talk about splitting the atom and nuclear weapons, I'm not sure what your average person on the street imagines. Perhaps they think that atoms are actually being destroyed to create the explosion. When a chemical explosive is detonated, the chemicals are rapidly being turned into gas, which is many many times more voluminous than the size of the solid or liquid explosives. This is not what's happening during a nuclear reaction.
The nuclei of atoms are held together by the strong nuclear force. Think of it like a door latch. The door latch holds together particles with similar electrical charge. I'm sure you remember playing with magnets, and you know that like poles repel each other. So, when you put the red end of magnet towards the red end of another magnet, they don't want to touch each other. The strong nuclear force holds those two red ends together, stopping them from flying apart. This is much akin to our coiled spring.
When the nucleus of an atom is split by being bashed into by another particle, a bit like a wrecking ball smashing into a house, then the 'latch' of the strong nuclear force is broken, and the particles with the same charge repel each other. The different parts of the atom fly apart because of this repulsion. It's like those coiled springs are uncoiling.
This means that energy is being released. Lots more energy than it took to unlatch the strong nuclear force that held the nucleus together. It's a bit like a room full of mouse traps, all sprung-loaded and waiting to go off. It only takes one light little touch to cause one mouse trap to go off, and before you know it, they're all setting each other off in a great big chain reaction.
And that's how a self-sustaining nuclear reaction works. A small amount of input energy is required to start the chain reaction, but once it's started, there's plenty of energetic particles flying around to smash into other nuclei and cause them to break apart. Less energy input was required than the amount of total energy output, and only a very small amount of the mass is actually being released, by the strong nuclear force being overcome, allowing the subatomic parts of the nucleus to fly apart.
The same cascade reaction is used in a nuclear power plant as was used in the atomic bombs that blew up Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's called nuclear fission.
So, how does this relate to anything? Well, whether it's reading a stack of books about nuclear physics (this, by the way, was only the most basic introduction I'm afraid) or writing hundreds of thousands of words, I'm kinda a bit like that coiled spring, ready to unleash my energy on whatever I can when I'm given my chance, and I'm unlatched.
I just need a small opening, a small opportunity, and I'll run headlong at it. I'm so desperately bored by having to go at snails pace because of the limitations of the world around me. I live with constant frustration that I can't go at a natural pace, and so I go twice as quick as I should do when I'm finally given the opportunity to get on with something.
Had I ever gotten the chance to study theoretical physics at university, I would have read half as much in twice the time. Had I ever gotten to write at my own pace, with enough money behind me to keep a roof over my head, I would have taken twice as long and written half as much.
I'm now wrestling with the problem that I'm pretty much working two jobs, and in one of them I'm trying too hard at to compensate for the lack of fulfilment in the other. My day job doesn't challenge me. My day job gives me zero job satisfaction. And so when I get home in the evenings, I write and I write and I write. I've even taken to rattling off a couple of short stories every day while I'm at work. The one I wrote this morning was 6,000 words. That's right. I just rattled off 6,000 words because I'm so damn frustrated and bored, but I'm still working a full time job as well as producing some 14,000 words a day. It's too damn much and I'm going to burn out, but my day job is utter bullshit. My life is utter bullshit.
It's such a fucking rush, a hurry. It's such a fucking struggle. Trying to put up with enough boring bullshit that I've got a lump of money behind me to allow me to take a break and work on something I love and I'm passionate about. Either that, or I just take the tiny windows of opportunity where I find them, and work as hard as I can and as fast as I can, before the bullshit catches up with me again.
I honestly thought to myself that prison wouldn't be so bad. So much time to read and write, and ponder stuff. Really, I'm a fucking prisoner at the moment. I can't exactly get an interesting book out at my desk. Even when I'm writing, I'm doing it while looking over my shoulder. I've got to keep one eye on the boss, and be on my game in case I get asked to do something or somebody has a question for me. It's so fucking tense you know? It's compressing me. It's squashing me. It's making me dense and dark and heavy.
I fantasise about living in a tent, unencumbered by having to make rent payments and keep the electric and gas switched on. What would I really need, in this day and age? You can do so much on a smartphone.
I'm coming full circle. In a little over a month I will have been writing every day for a year. This whole thing started with me writing about some research I did on a public bench at a railway station. I think how different my life was then, and somehow I had much better quality of life, even though I was destitute.
Do I want this? This life? This life of commuting on the morning train, and office chit-chat and the daily grind, and of looking busy at my desk and saying clever shit to impress the boss, and hiding in the toilets browsing the Internet, and writing short stories in a really small font to disguise what I'm doing, just to pass the endless boring hours, and watching the clock, counting down, counting down, down, down. Down to what? My premature death from the stress and anxiety of it all?
Plenty of research has now proven that working a boring shitty office job is more unhealthy and lifespan shortening than smoking. Famously, people are suing their employers for the mind-numbingly dumb work they're asked to do. It's almost physically agonising. I'm being squashed. My very life force, my energy, my dignity, my passion, my personality... it's all being squeezed out of me like I'm a tube of cheap toothpaste.
I feel so sick and anxious. I don't know how to continue. I know that fiscally it makes perfect sense to continue. It's easy money, but it doesn't look that easy when it seems to be the root cause of my mood instability. People either ask me to work too hard for too long, so I burn out, or they bore the shit out of me, so I eventually explode with frustration. The pyramid scheme of corporate life is destroying lives. My life is being destroyed.
Oh God I want to throw up. This isn't just a job you fuckers. This is literally fucking me up. I can't do it much longer. I'm going to have a motherfucking breakdown. I can't cope and I'm waving the white flag in surrender but yet the gunfire does not seem to pause.
"Everybody needs to work"
"You have a great job"
"You're so well paid"
"People would love to have your opportunities"
"Count your blessings"
"Just another few decades and you'll be rich beyond your wildest dreams"
"Not long now"
"C'mon it can't be that hard"
"You should try my job"
"You've got things easy"
"I'd love it if I was bored all the time"
"You spoiled bratty bastard"
"You earn 6 or 7 times as much as I do"
"Why don't you follow your dreams"
"You've got nothing to complain about"
FUCK OFF, FUCK OFF, FUCK OFF
Argh! I can't deny my feelings any longer. I fucking well did what I have to, to get out from a fucked up situation, and I got somewhat out of the way of the oncoming collision, but it's been at great personal expense. I can't express how much it's killed me to put myself in a position where I might as well put my brain in a pickle jar and wheel my cryogenically frozen body into position at my desk.
Imagine if I picked fruit and vegetables for a living, and I slept in a barn on the farm where I worked. I could keep some of the fruit and vegetables that I picked, and eat them. My labour would provide my contribution for my space in the barn, as well as enough beans, rice, pulses and meat to keep my protein and carbohydrate intake at a healthy level. I would be able to see, quite literally, the fruits of my labour each day.
I live a life that could not be more opposite. I will never meet the people who use my software, and I don't even create the software anymore. I manage a bunch of people to create software for me. And I don't even see the people I manage face to face. They live thousands of miles away in some developing world country. I don't even know what management is. I pretty much just say "you're doing a great job. Keep going!" over and over again, to these poorly paid people who toil away, on the other side of the planet. Then some money is digitally credited to my bank balance, and I digitally credit it somewhere else to pay my rent. I never see actual physical money. I don't ever carry cash. Coins are just an antique novelty to me.
Modern life is making me unwell, I can sense it.
I have embraced technology and science, and I understand it better than 99% of people. In abstract terms, I'm doing really well, and it looks insane to be dissatisfied with my lot in life, but how do I really define my existence? Can I define myself as a father and enjoy family life, when I have no children? Can I define myself as a builder or a soldier, when what I do is so ethereal and intangible? Can I define myself as a farmer or a gardener, when what I do is so unnatural?
I'm a spring. That's what I am: a rusty spring.
I'm coiled up and compressed, ready to unspring, ready to bounce and boing.
It's fucking awful, let me tell you, being so unable to apply yourself to some useful mission, project or productive endeavour. It's fucking awful, feeling so trapped and imprisoned. That's why my thoughts turn dark and brooding so often. That's why suicide is so often on my mind.