SELF-DETERMINATION
Someone wrote to me recently asking me to write about two things:
Personal sovereignty and authenticity.
Uff.
You didn't make this one easy.
I spent quite a while trying to find a single word that could contain both ideas.
You see, some of you may have already realised that there is a scientist hiding somewhere behind these posts. A rather pure one, actually.
I won't tell you exactly what kind.
I would like to remain unobserved for a little longer.
But being one means I have this annoying need to reduce complicated things into simpler structures. Give me five concepts and eventually I will try to compress them into one.
So, to whoever sent me this suggestion: forgive me if this isn't exactly what you meant.
I have decided to call it:
Self-determination.
At first, I thought about self-confidence.
But it didn't feel right.
Confidence is believing that you can do something.
Personal sovereignty seems deeper to me.
It is power.
Not power over other people. That kind of power has never interested me very much.
Power over yourself.
The ability to recognise your own instinct, intuition and values — and to act according to them even when nobody around you can guarantee that you are right.
And perhaps, more importantly, the ability to remain faithful to whatever your essence is while doing it.
Because there is a kind of ego that I don't think is necessarily bad.
The ego you control.
Not the one that controls you.
A small border around the self that says:
This is me. And that is you.
And thank God for that.
Imagine how boring the universe would be if we were all the same.
Apparently, I Am Confident
Not long ago, I was having a conversation with someone who told me that they admired my confidence.
That surprised me.
Because if you could see what happens inside my head while I make some of my decisions, I don't think confidence would be the first word that came to mind.
Many times, I genuinely have no idea what I am doing.
I simply need to move a piece.
Anywhere.
Then I watch where it lands and think:
Right. Let's see what new problem I've created.
And then I solve that one.
Apparently, from the outside, this looks like confidence.
Interesting.
During that conversation, this person told me that external recognition is important.
For example, imagine you're a footballer and Cristiano Ronaldo walks over after a match and tells you:
You played brilliantly.
Wonderful.
Or you're a writer and Margaret Atwood reads your novel and tells you:
I loved it. It's brilliant.
Even better.
Or you're a helicopter pilot and some legendary pilot watches you perform an incredibly difficult manoeuvre and afterwards tells you:
That was exceptional.
Lovely.
Obviously, I would enjoy all of those things.
I am self-determined, not dead.
But would any of them change how much I enjoyed playing, writing or flying five minutes before the compliment arrived?
I hope not.
Because otherwise we have a rather inconvenient problem.
Someone else has become responsible for deciding how valuable our own experience was.
And personally, I already have enough responsibilities.
I don't particularly want to outsource my self-worth as well.
After enough disappointments and a considerable amount of spiritual growth — mostly acquired the hard way, unfortunately — I developed a very simple attitude:
I do what I enjoy doing regardless of who approves of me enjoying it.
That's it.
I'm not saying this is the correct philosophy for life.
Actually, the older I get, the less interested I am in people who claim to know the correct way to live.
I only know that I became considerably happier when I stopped waiting for someone else to tell me that I was doing life correctly.
Because when you constantly search for recognition, what are you really searching for?
Validation?
Confirmation?
Someone to tell you:
Yes. You are good.
Yes. You are intelligent.
Yes. You made the right decision.
Yes. You are enough.
And why do we need somebody else to tell us?
Perhaps because somewhere underneath all of that we aren't entirely sure of what we are, who we are or where we're going.
And there it is.
The horrible question:
Who am I?
Closely followed by its even more irritating little brother:
What the hell am I doing with my life?
Unfortunately, I know those two rather well.
I Don't Understand Infinity
Do you remember when I told you that, at some point in my life, I bought a plane ticket, left home and had about fifty euros left to start a new life?
Well.
There was something that happened before that.
Something considerably less glamorous.
I was eighteen.
I was sitting in a science class and we were talking about infinity and differential calculus.
Normally, exactly the sort of thing my brain enjoys.
But that day something didn't fit.
I don't remember exactly how the thought began.
I only remember becoming suddenly, horribly conscious of my own existence.
Not my name.
Not being a student.
Not being someone's daughter.
Not what I was supposed to do next year.
Just—
me.
Existing.
Inside this apparently infinite universe.
And my brain did what my brain has always done when something doesn't make sense.
It tried to solve it.
Except this time the questions were slightly inconvenient.
What is infinity?
What happens when we die?
Why am I here?
What are we?
Why is there something instead of nothing?
You know.
Just a normal day at eighteen.
And then my brain apparently decided that the appropriate response to failing to solve several thousand years of philosophy, mathematics and physics during one class was complete panic.
Excellent.
I had such an enormous anxiety attack that, because I didn't want to worry my family, I walked to the hospital alone.
Imagine the scene.
An eighteen-year-old arrives at the emergency department crying, almost fainting, trying to explain to perfectly serious medical professionals:
I don't understand infinity.
I don't understand what happens when we die.
I don't understand what we're doing here.
They checked my blood pressure.
Physical markers.
Everything seemed fine.
Eventually, a psychiatrist came to see me.
He started asking the usual questions, trying to determine exactly which drawer of human malfunction I belonged in.
At some point, I told him that I had this strange feeling that we were living inside a screen.
He looked at me very seriously.
Do you actually see everything as though it were a screen?
I stared at him.
No. It's a metaphor.
For God's sake.
There I was, eighteen years old, having a complete existential crisis about infinity, death and the nature of reality, and somehow I was the one having to clarify the use of metaphor to the psychiatrist.
Excellent.
Anyway, apparently I was making far too much sense to be classified as completely insane, so they kept me under observation instead.
More doctors came.
More questions.
Mostly the same questions, actually.
Which fascinated me.
Different human beings entering the room, following almost identical protocols, asking almost identical questions, apparently expecting to arrive somewhere new.
And I was supposed to be the one questioning reality.
Right.
At some point, I will admit, The Matrix began to feel considerably less fictional than usual.
But let's not go there.
We have enough problems for one post.
What mattered was something else.
At some point I understood — or perhaps simply felt — that nobody in that hospital could answer the question that was actually frightening me.
They could help me with the panic.
But they couldn't tell me:
Who are you?
That one was mine.
And Then Everything Started Moving
The experience didn't disappear when I walked out of the hospital.
It took time.
Weeks.
And I don't want to romanticise it.
Panic, derealisation and depersonalisation can be deeply frightening experiences, and if you're experiencing them, getting proper help matters.
I can only tell you what happened in my case.
Something began changing.
The more frightened I became by the possibility that I didn't know who I was, the more urgently I wanted to find out.
And suddenly I started making decisions.
Leave this.
Start that.
Travel.
Stop.
Go.
Say no.
Say yes.
Abandon something.
Try something completely different.
I stopped living quite so much on autopilot.
And for the first time, I began making decisions with a strange kind of blind trust in myself.
Not:
This is definitely the right decision.
More like:
I have absolutely no idea whether this is the right decision, but it is mine.
There is an enormous difference.
And honestly, after having stared into infinity at eighteen and convinced myself that existence itself made absolutely no sense, many ordinary risks became considerably less terrifying.
What's the worst that can happen?
Actually, don't answer that.
My imagination is excellent.
But I moved anyway.
Years passed.
And strangely, decisions that had once looked completely disconnected began connecting.
One thing led to another.
Then another.
And another.
Until eventually my scientific little brain had to make room for one of those deeply irritating sentences spiritual people love:
Everything happens for a reason.
Ugh.
I hate it when they accidentally make sense.
Do I think that sentence is scientifically demonstrable?
No.
Please.
Do I understand now why people feel that way?
Absolutely.
Sometimes the meaning of a decision only becomes visible years after you make it.
A Pure State
And here, finally, comes the physics.
I was beginning to worry about us too.
There is something in quantum mechanics called a pure state.
Very roughly speaking, a pure state represents the most complete description quantum mechanics allows us to assign to the state of a system.
Mathematically clean.
Beautiful.
Elegant.
My kind of thing.
Unfortunately, there is a problem.
The universe refuses to leave things alone.
Real systems interact with their environments.
Particles interact with other particles.
Systems become entangled with their surroundings.
Information spreads through those interactions.
And when we consider only a subsystem, the coherent relationships between different possibilities can become effectively inaccessible.
We call this decoherence.
And I cannot resist the metaphor.
Because perhaps human beings begin with something resembling a pure state too.
Metaphorically.
Human consciousness is not a wavefunction.
Please don't send me angry emails.
We arrive with something.
Temperament.
Instinct.
Curiosity.
Preferences.
Some strange original combination that is ours.
And then—
decoherence.
Parents.
Teachers.
Friends.
Partners.
Society.
Money.
Success.
Failure.
Expectations.
Praise.
Rejection.
People telling you what is sensible.
People telling you what is ridiculous.
People applauding.
People laughing.
People watching.
Always the observers.
Interaction after interaction after interaction.
Until one day you look at yourself and wonder:
Which part of this is actually me?
That, to me, is where personal sovereignty begins.
Not by somehow returning to an untouched original state.
You can't.
Life has already interacted with you.
Thank God.
But perhaps you can still recognise something of the state that was originally yours.
You Cannot Avoid the Environment
And this is where I disagree slightly with the usual self-help version of personal power.
You know the one.
Take your power back.
You don't need anyone.
Choose yourself.
Protect your energy.
Become unstoppable.
Blah blah blah.
Personally, I don't want to become unstoppable.
It sounds exhausting.
And I certainly don't want to live like an isolated particle.
Even in physics, perfect isolation is an idealisation.
We interact.
That's the point.
Other people change us.
And we change them.
So the goal cannot be to prevent every interaction with the environment.
Perhaps the interesting question is:
How much interaction can you allow without forgetting the structure that was yours?
This is where ideas from quantum control become beautiful to me.
In quantum technologies, we don't simply demand that the environment disappear.
That would be convenient.
The universe, unfortunately, has declined our request.
Instead, we develop ways of controlling interactions, suppressing unwanted disturbances, correcting certain errors and preserving the quantum information we care about despite environmental noise.
That is a much more interesting metaphor for authenticity.
You don't need to disappear into a desert forever.
Although, personally, I recommend deserts occasionally.
You need to know what you are trying to preserve.
Your values.
Your curiosity.
Your honour.
Your strange interests.
Your instinct.
The things you love even when nobody applauds.
The things you would still do if Cristiano Ronaldo, Margaret Atwood and the world's greatest helicopter pilot never found out.
Maybe that is authenticity.
The Observer Again
And somehow we always return to the observer.
I suppose with a blog called The Unobserved, this was inevitable.
Other people's observations of us are useful.
Sometimes extremely useful.
Someone else can see a mistake we cannot.
Someone can teach us.
Correct us.
Challenge us.
Love us enough to tell us that we are being complete idiots.
Humility matters.
I already wrote an entire post about that.
Please don't make me repeat myself.
But another person's observation of you is still only an observation made from their position.
It is not your entire state.
Someone may think you're unsuccessful because you don't earn enough.
Someone else may think you're successful because you're free.
Someone may think you're irresponsible because you left.
Someone else may think you're brave because you did.
Same person.
Different question.
Different measurement.
So perhaps personal sovereignty is not refusing to be observed.
It is refusing to confuse the observation with the whole of yourself.
Something I Find Beautiful
There is one last thing I love about authenticity.
It sounds individualistic.
But I think the deepest version of it is exactly the opposite.
The more clearly I understand who I am, the more clearly I can see everything I am not.
And therefore everything I need from other people.
There are people who possess abilities I don't have.
Ways of thinking that don't come naturally to me.
Kinds of sensitivity I lack.
Things they understand that I probably never will.
And I find that beautiful.
Because sovereignty doesn't mean:
I don't need anyone.
It means:
I know where I end and where you begin.
And because I know that, I can meet you without needing to become you.
Perhaps that is why authenticity matters beyond ourselves.
A world full of people trying to become identical isn't particularly powerful.
A world full of different people who know themselves well enough to cooperate might be.
Individual sovereignty creating something larger.
Not independence.
Interdependence.
And perhaps this is where my interpretation of personal sovereignty differs from all those books promising to help you recover your power in twelve easy steps.
I don't particularly want to recover my power.
I want to recognise what is mine.
And I want you to recognise what is yours.
Because then perhaps neither of us needs to become smaller for the other one to exist.
Let the world change you.
Change the world a little in return.
Learn.
Interact.
Love people.
Lose people.
Be wrong.
Change your mind.
Become something you could never have predicted at eighteen.
But every now and then, when everything becomes noisy and everyone seems remarkably certain about who you should be, remove everything for a moment.
Remove the applause.
Remove the criticism.
Remove the degrees.
Remove the money.
Remove your job.
Remove your family name.
Remove the expectations.
Remove the observers.
And ask:
What remains?
Perhaps you won't have an answer.
That's fine.
I certainly didn't.
Move a piece.
See where it lands.
Observe.
And then move another.
Maybe self-determination was never about knowing exactly where you're going.
Maybe it is something much simpler:
not knowing where you are going, and still making sure that the next move is yours.