It’s been a month, and I’m back! Trying out a different sorta format this time — would love to hear what you think!
Let me tell you, with all the wisdom of my 21.5 years, about what it means to be a human: we exist, I think, as a balance between our internal self-consciousness and external responses, along axes of biology and society.
A brief explanation of the quadrants…
- QI. Internal, biological: us as a physiological system — the processes that maintain homeostasis & make us technically “alive,” our DNA, etc. At some level, this makes us the most “real,” and may be the basis for just about everything else. To me, it also ties us most closely to the rest of the life on earth, given the physical sameness that underlies our species that seems so exceptional, at times. See below, oxygen.
- QII. External, biological: us as an ecosystem — from the microbes physically within our bodies, to our small (or not so small) influence within the interdependent network of life on Earth. As humans, we did not evolve in isolation, and we do not exist in isolation now.
- QIII. External, societal: us as another player in the social, political, cultural, and economic landscape of civilization. Built in response to all the rest, but sometimes becomes justification of itself.
- QIV. Internal, societal: us as we are most aware — our “identity,” our purpose, and our consciousness. Often highly dependent on the former category, as our society and surroundings frame how we see ourselves. See below, “work”. Can, but often does not, incorporate the biological perspectives (although it’s a refreshing viewpoint, I find).
I’m missing things, I know, because I feel like I must embody more than two dimensions^, and the lines are all necessary blurred— but for now, this is my best attempt at categorizing the messy thing we call life. And here’s how a few topics I read about fit into this framework:
^ Perhaps a third dimension is the relative weighting these categories play in our identity at any given moment.
Oxygen (QI)
My BME classes are very QI. Recently, we’ve been talking a lot about oxygen: how its transported, how to monitor it, how we breathe. We’ve talked a little about hemoglobin — the red in our blood — and how its structure is just so that it can bind and release the molecule in the right place at the right times. I’ve been thinking back to high school, when we learned about why oxygen is so critical, enabling the efficient aerobic respiration by accepting electrons to drive ATP production and all — and the more I think, the more in awe I am that all these tiny circumstances came together and persisted and accumulated to literally energize us, our thoughts, our actions, and all of their influences. If you do ever have a free moment, think about what is physically happening inside your body, your cells, when you breathe — and how the same fundamental thing happens in the grass, and the ants, and your fingertips and your knees. It can be disconcertingly re-centering. If you’re weird like me and want to read more about oxygen, check out these:
- Icefish Study Adds Another Color to the Story of Blood — A deeper look into the evolution of oxygen transport, and how it works a little different for fish that live in Antarctic waters. Click at least to see the crazy clear blood and crazier clear fish.
- Tumor Ensemble-Based Modeling and Visualization of Emergent Angiogenic Heterogeneity in Breast Cancer – Super cool framework that integrates really high-resolution imaging with computational modeling to map the heterogeneity of blood flow and oxygenation within tumors. I won’t lie and say I completely understood the whole article, but I tried my best and found it to be a striking window into the complexity, chaos, and sensitivity of how we work at a cellular level.
Work (QIII)
I’ve had more than a few “Work is good, relaxing is bad, but work is also bad and relaxing is also good, and I don’t know what to do because what even is the meaning of life these days?!” conversations in the past month.
Then I listened to this podcast, and learned that work didn’t always define our purpose for existence in the world. So much resonated — the pressure to have your job be your passion be your impact and meaning, the constant guilt of not working (and the laptop-open TV-watching habit to mitigate that guilt), the stress of productivity being a measure of self-worth and value… and it was enlightening to hear about how this trend, so specific to this time and this place, propagates as a result of our social, economic, and political systems. Capitalism these days. That’s all I’ll say here.
Et cetera
- Still alarmed about climate change. Read (ahem… listened to) The Uninhabitable Earth. Concerned and confused.
- Trying out a new app: WeCroak reminds you 5 times a day that you’re gonna die. It’s oddly uplifting.
- Laguna turned one this month :)