My name is Tomo Umer, I'm 26 years old, the nickname I've used across a wide variety of games is psiho333 and my life goal is to write more than Isaac Asimov did - he's said to be the most productive writer so far and I want to top that, with quality stories of my own (I have nothing but respect for him as a writer).
Exactly one year ago I quit my PhD in particle physics at Trieste - I was one of the physicist working in the CMS collaboration at CERN - in order to have the time to write. But life is never that simple. I needed to be sure, I needed the time to find out more about myself and I needed to think a lot about the first book I decided to start writing. And because of that, the last year was, for me, the most carefree in my whole life. I had some money left over from the PhD and I lived my life day by day, figuring out the details as I went.
I can finally happily and confidently say that I found out who I am. I'm not writing this lightly, because understanding oneself is, in today's world, one of the most difficult things to do. We live in a world where "overchoice" has grown exponentially from the year 1975 when the term was first coined, to 2015 the day I'm writing this. There's too much of everything, and too little of ourselves, of who we really are. In today's world searching for ourselves is at least equally challenging as searching for a needle in a haystack with nothing but bare hands to help you. And because of that, most people - even supposed adults - live with masks hiding their true selves, without even realizing it.
It's easy to be afraid and hide or to comfort to someone else's rules, because that way we don't have to think about ourselves, about taking on some responsibility. People are afraid of control, some think that Google, NSA (National Security Agency), Yahoo, Facebook and other sites know more about ourselves than we do. But it's that really the case?
Even for a single individual as myself, to understand me, you'd have to go through immense physical pain - I swam for 5km butterfly and always sought my physical limits in order to go beyond them. I know how it is to have every muscle, every cell in your body scream with pain and still go on. I've endured psychological traumas, with the death of two close friends, born in the same year as myself - one suicide (R.I.P. Elvis Sladić, you were one of the most prominent young physicists I've met) and one heart attack (R.I.P. Tomaž Veljak, you truly were unlucky that night).
I was in love again and again, each time with an unhappy ending, having whole weeks of depressed and mourning periods, without seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. There are so many stories that I could tell - is NSA really going to collect them all? What for? People need to realize that there is simply too much information around, and the only reason why NSA is so successful is because most people hide and only a few individuals get picked on. What if everyone would, like me, say: "Hey NSA (and other such companies), collect my data and see how much I care. I don't have anything left to fear, lose or hide. I know myself."
This is not the right place to tell all of my life's story. I might do it sometime in the future, but it's not relevant at the moment. What I do care is that I finally managed to figure myself out and I'll explain the 5 most important things I found out when looking for myself. This is the culmination of my life's worth and the "lazy" and "unproductive", even self destructive last year is what helped me put all the puzzle pieces together.
I'm writing this in hopes it will help someone else as well. The points are in no particular order.
5) Games (or Drink vodka, play Dotka. Cyka! Blyat.)
Games are at the center of our lives. From the early ages on, we play and by playing we learn. Some people associate play with kids and by doing so, they limit what they could achieve.
One of my favorite verses of lyrics comes from Megadeth:"I don't remember where I was, I realized life was a game. The more seriously I took things, the harder the rules became."
I don't think that you should turn everything into a game. That's not the point. The point of seeing life as a game is about how you engage with the world, how everything can be fun and interesting to learn. In the following I'll talk about two different category of games and I'm going to talk about them separately. Not all games are the same.
5.a) Board games
Board games have existed for millenia. From the simple early games with dice (invented in ancient Greece or perhaps even before) to complex modern day games like Battlestar Galactica that require hours of learning before you get to know all the rules.
There are abstract games and games with a concrete theme. Not so long ago I learned of a game called Tafl, also known as "viking chess", which was similar to chess, but a lot more assymetrical between the two players. These kind of two player games have aided great leaders in the past in understanding their opponents, their strengths and weaknesses and their way of playing and leading their armies. The most able of leaders were unpredictable and through their games they realized who their opponent was, while it didn't happen the other way round.
If you're asking yourself why does that matter, look no further than the Sun Tzu's teachings from The Art of War: "If you know the enemy and yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself, but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle."
For someone like me, who played chess semiprofessionally for 9 years (and then dropped it, because I didn't see myself as a chess player in the long run), it's incredibly easy to understand how the kind of strategy your opponent adopts can be linked to his (or hers) personality. If you've never experienced it, try playing a board game with your friends. Once you understand the rules, start observing the behavior of your friends. In games that include negotiations, that's even better. You can see who relies heavily on feelings, who can be bribed, who's unsure of their own capabilities and who (if anyone) is the master puppeteer that talks everyone into doing their own bidding.
Now granted, abstract games might not be for everyone, but in today's world there's been an explosion of games of all kinds. A quick glance on boardgamegeek can show you how far we've come. So on top of being "fun" and "engaging", the board games can really tell you a lot about the people you're playing with.
You might argue that with conversation you've got a far better chance of understanding someone. Unfortunately, as I briefly mentioned before, we people tend to put on masks. So talking with people can tell you everything about them, if they're sincere - to themselves in the first place. In a board game, on the other hand, if it is engaging enough (if not, why would you play it? pick another game that suits you better), we forget that we're in a game and we can show our true selves.
Ask anyone who knew me and very likely they'll have a story where I got so mad I punched someone - boys only, I don't hit girls, and even when I lost my temper I hit them some place I knew it wouldn't hurt badly - shoulder. You know, me and my best friend throughout high school constantly punched each other in the shoulder, to see who will be the first to give up. In the past I couldn't control my rage and I've always told myself it was because of *insert a stupid excuse here*, always looking for reasons to explain myself.
In time, I realized anger was a part of me I had to let go. But for most part, I didn't even know it was there - it sure did surface when I sought victory in games.
5.2) Video games
Contrary to board games, these are more single-player oriented, or multi-player online. There are some games that can be played usually up to a maximum of 2 people on the same computer and some console games up to 4 (theoretically 8), but these are rare - too rare in my opinion.
So when playing a videogame, you're faced with a completely different beast than a board game. Not because of the fact that board games you can touch and on a PC everything is done with a mouse and a keyboard, but instead, they're inherently different in their social interactions. Meaning that in most videogames, you have none.
In a videogame, if it is multiplayer, you usually interact with avatars and nicknames and I know of a lot of people (me included) who used these nicknames in order to let off some steam. Trolling and such, yeah. I don't think trolls are bad people as some research seems to suggest. Trolls are simply people who forgot that even online, you are dealing with another human being. They think (and for quite some time, I thought the same) it's just another avatar - so let's have fun with that.
There's even more and more research that points out how social networks and online games contribute very little to our feelings of being alone in the world. In fact, they even provoke these feelings of loneliness, so one should be careful as for how much time he or she spends playing and interacting on social media.
Having said that, what are videogames good for?
Videogames can be infinitely more complex than board games. Advanced computations and physics to make the modern games look and feel as real as possible. They have become almost perfect simulations for certain aspects of our lives, a way to live a different life, to understand how it was to lead the Roman legions against an upcoming invasion or how the whole societies are created and destroyed. They can teach us about history, about politics, diplomacy, taking a life or saving one. Videogames even have (in my opinion) some of the best stories I have ever read or seen. The Longest Journey saga, The Sands of time trilogy, Bioshock trilogy, Half-Life duology and episode-ology and so on.
And then there are games who don't teach you anything about the real world. Games that are purely for fun and games that sharpen your reflexes and your brain activity. And here's where Dota 2 comes in. I love this game and have played it already 10 years ago when it was still a mod for Warcraft 3. This is a kind of game where you pick an avatar (hero) and try to work with 4 other teammates in defeating an enemy team of 5 heroes. Pretty much like quantum mechanics, no matter how good you think you are at understanding it, there are still layers of perception that evade you. There are around 110 total heroes and they vary from the simplest ones - 2 active spells and 2 passive (active spells are abilities you, as a player, need to activate, while passive are activated automatically), to heroes which have 4 complex active spells (Invoker even has 10, he truly is a beacon of knowledge blazing across a vast sea of ignorance) that require practice and learning to understand how to use them effectively. Dota 2 is not an easy game. In fact, game is hard as I like to joke, but that actually makes me more interested in it.
And for me personally that's a really beautiful thing: no matter how hard life gets, it simply cannot be harder than understanding Dota 2 in every little detail and function perfectly with 4 other players in real time. Hence the saying, ez game, ez life (if a game that's hard seems easy to you, then so can life). There was even a time I was addicted to Dota and I now find it a great thing, because I know there is nothing in this world that could be more addictive to me than games, and Dota in particular. And thanks to it, I learned how to control my addictions.
Of course, Dota 2 is not the only game in the MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) genre: there's the League of Legends and the Heroes of Newerth and now Blizzard tries to join in with the Heroes of the Storm. There are others and there will be even more in the future. It's a matter of personal taste which of them you prefer and I won't debate here the differences. If you ask me, Heroes of Newerth is the hardest to master, because it's like Dota on steroids - the base mechanics are the same, but everything happens faster. Dota 2 has the second place as far as difficulty goes, followed by League of Legends and somewhere far behind drag the Heroes of the Storm (it's really dumbed down, isn't it?). But bear in mind that complexity isn't always a good thing. And in fact, I've met people who said that Dota 2 is just too difficult and they'd rather stick to LoL.
There are of course a ton of other games that sharpen your reflexes and can consume all of your time if you allow them to - I can perfectly understand how someone can't stop playing yet another match of Halo, Enemy Territory (when you try to exit the game, a message appears stating "yeah, like you have anything better to do"), Counter Strike, Team Fortress 2, GTA 5, driving simulations, FIFA, arcade games and whatnot. Here it's really up to a personal taste, but interestingly enough, tell me what game you play and I'll tell you what kind of person you are.
Just as an example, it's no mystery that the favorite game of the USA's army is Halo. A first-person shooter and as such, it's been proven to reduce the effect of the post-traumatic stress disorder soldiers suffer after going to war. Games really do tell us a lot about ourselves. And it has been through discovering all the different types and kind of games that I learned, little by little, about my weaknesses and strengths. In my opinion, everyone should give them at least a few tries.
4) Freedom
Ah, freedom. A word that gets thrown around when USA invades another country. Freedom and democracy. Please note, however, I am not hateful towards them. In fact, so far all the Americans I met (either in real life or online) are great people and are against such policies - same way as most Slovenians are against our state policies, it's just that most people don't do anything about it.
Returning to the topic at hand, the ultimate freedom in my opinion is that each and everyone of us can take their life at any time. There's nobody that can prevent you from doing that. But dying is easy, it's living that's hard. Living with your choices and consequences and if you're an integral person, you have to live with responsibility (I wish more people accepted some).
An ideal free world would be such that every person could be independent from everyone they wished and depend only on people they chose to. This is something which doesn't happen in our world and perhaps never will. From the early age onward, we are subjugated to rules and convictions of previous generations. If someone is lucky, then people surrounding him (or her) will listen to what that person has to say. Most of the time, however, people won't listen to you until you come off age, become highly educated or have lots of money. Preferably all of them combined. In other words, we are free to express ourselves, but nobody will listen. Can this way of living even be called freedom?
Changing the world is something more and more people are thinking of and actually, during my life I've read about plenty of individuals who took their stand. If you ask an anthropologist, they'll likely tell you that if nothing changes, the Western Civilization is nearing it's end - the same way the Roman empire or the Aztecs did so long ago. We're following every step in their decline, without even realizing it. Since, however, the perception of certain individuals about this is changing, there is still some hope.
In the scenario that nothing changes, what about our personal freedom?
This question is tricky, exactly because it's personal and therefore doesn't have a unique answer. My idea of personal freedom might be completely different from yours. Keep this in mind when you read forward and ask yourself: what makes you feel free?
For me, to be truly free, I need only my brain, because for me to be free it simply means to be able to think about stories and to create them. About my past and future, about imaginary words, about anything. I thought what it would be like to land in a prison because of a stupid reason - like pirating stuff. Everyone does that, it's free publicity (this has actually been proven by researches and the reason Switzerland didn't pass an absurd law on piracy) and it shouldn't be illegal. Everyone who has at least a bit of a brain will realize in time that by paying for stuff you like, you support the authors. People pirate only when they don't have money or when they want to try something out - think of this as a trial version. In due time, I buy everything I can from the artists I wish to support, be it games, graphic novels, movies or music.
At any rate, if I landed in prison, I wouldn't feel like my freedom has been taken away from me. I'd still be able to think about things and write. Putting me in prison would actually be a pretty bad move, because in there I couldn't do many things, while thinking and writing would still be something I could. And I'd think about politics and how to change the current system. The same people who put me there would live to regret the day they did. This is not a menace, it's a simple consequence of what I'm writing here. We've seen what desperate men did throughout history. If you unjustly imprison people for possession of drugs like marijuana (which will be legalized everywhere in a matter of few years), or because of piracy, then don't start crying when these same people will make you regret it: karma is a bitch.
Having said that, once you know what personally makes you feel most free, the next step is to join forces, stand together and fight for our collective freedom. Not in a violent way, mind you - violence and aggression never solve anything, they only invite vengeance and retribution in a never ending cycle of blood and death. Everyone should do what makes them feel free as long as it's not harmful towards others.
3) Mens sana in Corpore sano
This is something that already the Romans figured out:"Healthy mind in a healthy body." I realized you can't have one without the other. The problem is, as modern science teaches us, our willpower is limited. By doing too much sports, you'll very likely neglect your intellect and vice versa. I think the two should be considered equal and everyone of us owes to ourselves to take care of our minds and bodies.
For me at the present time, taking care of my body means doing Yoga (you might laugh, but only until you see the exercises I actually do. Then you'll either respect me or want me to teach you). I like it because it doesn't take a huge amount of time to practice and at the same time, I don't need anything to do it. The trouble with other sports is, I realized, is that I was always bound by money or the possibility to practice the sport where you currently are. And that's why in the past, I was always changing form being overweight, to being ripped with muscles and back again - it all depended on when and if I could do the sport I was currently practicing - swimming, gymnastics, running, cycling etc.
Another thing to be aware of is that we can actually become addicted to sports. If you've never been into sports it might sound impossible, but it's true. Once you get going and don't quit, you'll come to a phase where you will feel like shit for every day you skip practice. Addiction is never good, so bear in mind that this can happen and unless you want to be a professional athlete, you'll have to find your own balance between doing too little and too much for your body. There's not an easy way - only trial and error will teach you.
And then there's the mind. I think most people today realize that they have to take care of their bodies, but what about the mind?
I realized I have two different ways of engaging the brain - one to make it more active, the other to make it ordered and calm.
To keep my brain responsive and active, I like to play games (see pt. 5), play an instrument (I play the piano, clarinet and learning the violin) or do science (I love math in particular, and currently the research that intrigues me most is Neuroeconomics).
All of the above are great, but in order to keep calm, make sense of stuff and order my thoughts, I very much like meditation. Research has shown that by meditating (call it mindfulness if you will), we eliminate the so called "sunk-cost bias" i.e. the prejudices and thoughts that are affected by our feelings and not actual logical reasoning. By engaging in meditation on a daily basis I essentially try to become more and more objective and take good decisions. I like to think of myself and other people as rational beings. That's what differentiates us from other animals.
Another point in favor of meditation is that it's probably the best way towards achieving "the flow" - a state of mind in which our brains actually require less resources to function, but is far more productive and effective. It has probably happened to you that when you were so engaged in something the time flew by - that's the flow state. And it is possible to achieve it willingly.
At tis point you may rightfully ask: but what is meditation in its essence? I don't conceive of it as a sort of spiritual manifestation. I simply think of it as a way to clear my mind of all thoughts. The underlying principle is quite simple: set a timer on your mobile phone, sit in a pose that's comfortable but not relaxing (you don't want to fall asleep) and "simply" think of nothing. From everything I learned from around the web, the easiest way to get started is to focus on your breath and then count how many times you breathe in and exhale. Each time the mind drifts away to other thoughts you simply take note of it and resume counting (from the beginning if you don't know where you left off).
When I first started meditating I realized how many thoughts were on my mind. It was mind-blowing to say the least. Try it yourself, and you might be equally surprised to find out how easy it is to get distracted with thoughts you didn't even know you had.
2) Life & Friends
I'll say it again: living is hard. If we were born in a different era, it could have been much easier. Take the Vikings for example. They believed that if they die in battle, they will be escorted by Valkyries - warrior women - to Asgard, where they will feast with gods and heroes alike, while drinking beer and mead. For them, it was a pleasure to storm into battle, with war cries that echoed along the land, scaring their opponents to death. Life was simple.
Today it's much more complicated, due to the fact that our knowledge is completely different from that in the past and if you're an inteligent person, it's common to over-think, potentially leading to depression and even suicide.
I've arrived at the point when I didn't care about my life anymore. I smoked cigarettes as a means of proving it to myself and the world. In fact, at the time of writing this, I could easily smoke a whole pack in a single day. A dear friend of mine said:"It's really sad to hear you say that. To hear anyone say that.". Sad or not, that was my opinion on my own life. And then I realized something: I don't want to be self-destructive anymore. On a everyday basis there are enough things that could potentially kill me (just think of all the road accidents), and I know that. In our world, random "unjust" events can happen. C'est la vie (that's life).
I now have a clear goal and I want to be alive for as long as possible, to write as much as I can. And just like that I decided to stop smoking and doing other harmful things to myself. Even more than that, I started to realize that every person I met had a story of their own and should be respected as such. Nobody should have the power to take another person's life, for whatever reason. All the wars, the battles, bloodstained curtains and battlefields full of severed limbs of dead soldiers. It's all in vain.
I realize there are situations when you simply can't act otherwise. There can be moments in your life when you're forced to make a choice: kill (your enemy) or be killed first. But these are really, really extreme and rare cases. How can anybody know in the first place that their enemy wants to kill them? Far too many times, an enemy is placed before an exact same dilemma and might kill before the other person can manage to. But if noone shots first, nobody dies.
Why not come forward and refuse to kill other people? Why not be the first one to say:"You know what? Fuck that, let's grab a beer and talk it over." Words can be far more powerful than any weapon is. Words survive centuries and especially in today's world once something gets on the internet, it is there to stay. I was placed in a position where if I had been born a few centuries ago, I would have killed a guy to get a girl that's like a copy of myself from another universe - same in the way of thinking, but different enough that she could help me grow into a better person and I could do the same with her. And we could have done incredible things together, amplifying each other.
But even if that girl won't ever be mine, that's ok. Too many wars have been started throughout history because of women - and yet the ones to start them were always men. Men too stupid, prideful or simply hungry for power or for something they couldn't have. This particular situation made me stressed out and angry as I haven't been in a long time. But ultimately, I'm grateful, because it made me understand how it is possible to just leave the anger be. For too long it has plagued me, but not anymore.
Instead of looking for reasons to quarrel, find friends. Already Epicurus, philosopher from ancient Greece, said that friends are one of the 3 things you need for happiness - and he emphasized the point that friends should not be just some random people you meet over coffee. They have to be people you spend quite some time with. Friends can help you understand yourself and can teach you how not to make the same mistakes they did. One of the best things that I could allow myself in this one year of officially doing nothing (at least nothing that would give me some money) was spending quite some time with different groups of people, different friends, and because of that I have plenty of wonderful memories, as well as enormous personal growth - those who knew me before will confirm you that I have changed a lot. My friends took me in completely unexpected directions, making me think and realizing a lot about them and myself.
If you surround yourself with friends, you don't need enemies. You don't need someone to win against. Instead, you have people who are prepared to win together with you. And the more your circle of friends extends, more chances are you'll meet new circles of friends and so on and so forth, ultimately being friendlier with everyone - even people you haven't met yet. Sure, there are some people that might seem like complete bastards - but perhaps that's a natural evolution for someone who ultimately feels alone. You're not alone. We're not alone. All of us are living on a beautiful planet called Earth and if we won't manage to get along together, personal vendettas as well as large scale massacres are inevitable.
1) Myself
At the end of the day, there's only a single person you're obliged to live with: yourself. As I mentioned briefly before, that's something I couldn't stand. I even considered suicide more than once. What forever eliminated the idea of suicide was smoking weed. Yes, you read that right. A particularly bad trip made me realize suicide would be the worst idea I ever had, and I never looked back. Because of weed I won't ever consider suicide and I'm grateful for that. I currently don't smoke anymore (neither tobacco, cigarettes nor weed) and I don't know if I will in the future - though I am in favor of marijuana legalization.
After this whole year of thinking and searching for myself, I realized why I was unhappy and depressed and it's pathetically simple: I didn't know myself and therefore, on countless occasions I made choices that went against what I truly wanted. That's what made me miserable.
I realized that writing is the only thing that made sense in my life. All the different things I did in my life, all the ups and downs, they could be easily woven together by writing: the more various and interesting my life will be, the better the stories I will write. So now I smile in face of every adversary, every hard moment and doubt - I know what to do with them. The person who helped me realize I was a writer was Andrzej Sapkowski, in my opinion the best fantasy writer alive today, but with a horrible English translation of his books - I told him that and he said he heard it from other people as well. I wrote about this event already in the introduction to my book, so I'll skip the details here.
Finding out who you are is not the end, however. It's merely the beginning. The next important step that comes just after learning about yourself, is understanding who do you want to be. This way you have a clear idea of where you are and who you are in the present moment, as well as a feeling of where you're headed - or, even better, a clear goal. At this point, life becomes easier. For every thing you do, you can simply ask yourself: "Am I nearer to who I want to be, or was this a step in the wrong direction?"
Sometimes the answer won't be immediate or perhaps there won't even be a clear answer. But it's enough to get a sense of "Yeah, I feel I'm getting closer to my goal" rather than "Why the hell did I do that?". If you're in doubt, here's what friends are for (see pt. 2). If you have a clear view of yourself, you can be sincere with people you know and care about, and they will listen and tell you their own opinion. If their opinion somehow matches what you wanted - then you're on the right path. If their opinion is in sharp contrast of what you thought, then it's time to ask some more people for advice, perhaps on the internet - reddit is the best place to start. I cannot even begin to describe with words how much reddit has helped me so far and how much I learned from it. Truly, it is the front page of the internet. Thank you strangers of reddit! Keep being awesome and spreading knowledge and fun!
There is another possible scenario to the answers you might get. The worst of the three. Namely, the things you learn from others might only confuse you further. If this happens, then it's time to face yourself again. Do what you must to isolate yourself, or give yourself some time to think things through. Why are you confused? Is it something that your friends or other people said and it doesn't have to do with you at all? Or is it, in fact, that you yourself were not honest enough with them and with yourself?
Whatever the answer to those questions might be, you owe it to yourself to find a way to communicate with your inner self, to be completely truthful - what brings that part of you out? Is it writing, music (listening or playing to an instrument), is it drawing, perhaps photographing, hiking, doing sports, doing science, playing games, something else entirely?
I cannot emphasize this hard enough: there's nobody who'll give you all the answers except for yourself. I can give advice, but I don't even know who I'm specifically addressing, so take these as guidelines or suggestions. This is something me, you and everyone else needs to figure out for themselves - understand what kind of activity allows us to be ourselves. But don't worry, once you find it, you'll know for sure. Be prepared to search far and wide and not be afraid to try new things. Again, here friends can be incredibly helpful by showing you what it's out there, because friends (as opposed to acquaintances, whom you can equally befriend) have at least something in common with you. Who's to say that they won't introduce you to some more interesting new things that you both like?
To finish this off, let me point out one last time how important is to think about yourself, to scrutinize your doubts and understand your fears. Along the way it will be hard, but I can promise you that in the end, it's worth it. I can finally say I'm happy to live my life, writing my own story a moment at a time. I wish for you, my dear reader, and for everyone else, to do the same. Person by person, this will improve humanity as a whole and we'll be able to stand together for a better tomorrow.
