Far From Equilibrium: Raw Data From An Unoptimized Life

I am currently working on a new book titled Far From Equilibrium: Raw Data From An Unoptimized Life. It is not, in any way, a continuation of my first book Our Physics So Far, and it is not a conventional popular science book. It is also not a self-help manual, a memoir in the usual sense, or a clean philosophical thesis with a tidy conclusion at the end.

The book begins with initial conditions: a twenty-one-year-old life in the twenty-first century, trying not to break, and trying to understand how to survive without becoming stable. From there, it moves into patterns, data, and constraints: it explores the human condition through the lens of statistical physics. In metaphysics, individuals are “particulars,” and what differentiates them is the unique combination of properties they are endowed with. In this book, we imagine humans as dynamical systems navigating a high-dimensional space of all possible traits - good and bad. So why do some people turn out “good” and others “bad”? Are these fixed essences, or biased trajectories shaped by initial conditions? Birth environment, genetics, early life circumstances, culture, etc. act like boundary conditions and local gradients in a complex landscape, and so this is not an equilibrium system. And then, of course, human lives are finite. Unlike ideal ergodic systems, we do not have enough time to explore the full space of possible states. We remain trapped in local basins of attraction. In other words, if we lived for thousands of years, our trajectories would wander more broadly; given enough time, perhaps good people would turn bad and bad people would turn good.

After that, the book turns to models; all of physics is modeling what we observe in the physical world, and all of life is making our own model of the world. After trying to build models of madness, we turn to a deeper and more unsettling question: What is reality? What is real? Are we really in control of our lives, or are we all just pretending we are? What does it really mean to live authentically in a world that often feels like a programmed game? We talk about the script, the scriptwriter, and even attempt to write a letter to the simulator. But then we realize the pointlessness of it all, and turn to an even more dangerous question: What if we stop playing by the rules? What if we choose to think for ourselves in a world that rewards convenience over truth? What if we decide to stop seeking meaning, stop accepting the script, and stop chasing the finish line of a pointless race? That is when we try to embrace the void - but in a way that does not require collapsing into nihilistic despair.

The book is currently in preparation, and while I cannot give an exact release date right now, I wanted to share the opening note of the book in this blog: What this book is not.

So you may wonder why I choose to focus on what this book is not, rather than what this book is. Maybe because the moment I try to define it too neatly, I start betraying it. This book does not belong to a clean category. It is not fiction, although it may leave some readers questioning where fiction ends and reality begins. It is nonfiction, but not in the usual sense: it moves through my life, my experiences, physics, philosophy, and so much more, without fully belonging to any one of them. It borrows from all of them, but more importantly, it refuses to become any one of them. That means being messy, and that is intentional.

The moment you can be defined cleanly, the moment you fit into a particular category, you become neat. You become clean. To the system, you become good, because you obey the system. You become a showpiece. A beautiful one, maybe, but still a showpiece placed neatly in the section of your category inside the museum of conventions.

But some things cannot be defined easily. Some things are uncomfortable, paradoxical, messy. They are not good in the ordinary sense. They are anomalies. And the system is always afraid of what it cannot explain. So anomalies become evil. They must be removed. Often, they are. But not always. Sometimes an anomaly survives long enough to stop apologizing for being difficult to classify. It remains messy, uncomfortable, and hard to place. But it remains. This book can be thought of as a consequence of that remainder in my life. So before I tell you what I want this book to become, I should probably tell you what I refuse to let it become.

As I said, this is not a popular science book. My first book Our Physics So Far could be categorized as a popular science book. It was a book I started writing when I was fifteen, mostly because I was in the process of developing an unhealthy obsession with physics at that time, and I could not rest until I had written down, in my own words, the things I learned, and the ideas that came to me. I was naive then, of course, but not completely unaware. Even at that age, I figured out there were already many excellent popular science books on physics, written by actual physicists, and that another book simply explaining the same ideas would not add much on its own. So I tried (mostly unsuccessfully, I think) to make it wider. I wrote about physics, but also about consciousness, reality, and metaphysics. Still, at its core, it remained a book about physics: the journey from early cosmology to classical mechanics, from relativity to quantum mechanics, and then toward the quest to find a unified theory. In that sense, it was still an ordinary book, at least compared to what this one is trying to be. But I am glad I wrote it. Sometimes I open it now and feel the naivety immediately. Some lines make me smile; some make me feel grateful that I do not have to sit in front of my readers when they read those lines! But when I hold the physical copy in my hands, it still feels worth it. It feels worth the strange decision to neglect much of the usual life of a fifteen-year-old boy in favor of writing a book about the universe. And that, perhaps, is where the problem begins.

We are always trying to justify our choices. We turn our lives into stories after living them, as if every obsession must have been part of a bigger plan, every sacrifice must have meant something. I was terrible at that kind of justification. I still am. And I am learning that this need to make everything make sense is one of the deepest programs we carry, and it is not easy to defy it.

This book is not Our Physics So Far 2.0. Not even close. I will still use physics often; and you have to forgive me for that, since physics is a big part of my life. I will talk about statistical physics, complex systems, entropy, and other things that, at first glance, may seem to have little to do with physics. But physics here is not only the subject. It is also a language, a metaphor, sometimes even a weapon. This book is about the deeper wrestles: with reality, with meaning, with the void. And how I dealt with them.

No, that does not mean this book is some kind of self-help manual. I am not here to tell you how to live your life, how to become successful, how to optimize your time, or how to turn suffering into productivity. I have no method to sell. No final answer. No secret mantra. I am not writing from the top of a mountain. I am writing from somewhere inside the system. And it would be extremely dishonest of me to pretend to have it all figured out when I use music and coffee as a means to negotiate basic peace treaties with my existential crises!

So yeah, this book does not offer a method for becoming happy, successful, productive, or whole. Honestly, if anyone advised me on how to remain whole in a world that feels this broken, I would either assume they were living inside a bubble, or that they had access to the source code of reality. I would not pretend to have any solution to the problems that the world faces today. What I have is only raw data from a life still moving through its fluctuations. This book is simply a raw record of me trying to think, create, survive, and make sense of a life that never quite agreed to become optimized. Some chapters of this book are personal. Some are speculative. Some are probably borderline unhinged.

You may ask me: Why write this book? What is so special about your life? Well, nothing. I think I am writing this book because certain ideas do not let me rest. Once they enter my mind, they keep circling until I either write them down or become unbearable to myself. Some people have told me that what they see in me is closer to urgency than to ambition. Maybe that is true. Ambition wants to reach somewhere. Urgency feels like something is burning already. And even as I am typing this, something actually is: the bridge between my life and my death (forgive the poor metaphor; I know I am only 21, and I promise I am not trying to be dramatic).

This book comes from that urgency. It comes from my attempt to understand why we keep going in a world that does not owe us meaning; why we think, build, love, laugh, sing, rebel, mess up, and begin again, even when the universe gives no guarantee that any of it matters. Life, to me, often feels like a quest to find meaning in an inherently meaningless world. Not because meaning is waiting somewhere intact, but because searching itself becomes one of the ways we remain alive. And why do we want to stay alive so badly, knowing none of this is permanent? I know we are programmed for survival; but that only explains the mechanism, not the ache. It tells us why the body resists the end, not why the mind keeps demanding a reason for the resistance. A heartbeat can be biological, but the need to make that heartbeat mean something is stranger. That is where the question begins for me: not in whether life wants to continue, but in why continuation alone is never enough.

I have spent years moving between physics, music, writing, research, grief, institutions, rejection, friendship, loneliness, betrayal, existentialism, and the stubborn need to make something out of all this. Somewhere along the way, physics became more than a subject for me. It became a language. Not a perfect language, but a reliable way of thinking about everything. Reliable not because it always gave me answers, but because it never pretended to love me before betraying me. It could be incomplete, difficult, even wrong in places, but it was honest in its own way. Sometimes it helped. Sometimes it failed. But even its failures left behind insight, not the kind of emotional wreckage that people often do.

Physics gave me a language, but life gave me the material. And the material was never clean. If I polished the material too much, I would not be making it clearer; I would be removing the very thing that made it alive. That is why this is raw data. Not because it is careless, or completely random, but because I do not want to over-clean it until the life disappears. I do not want to turn every wound into a lesson, every contradiction into a conclusion, every uncertainty into a quote fit for a wall. Some things are here because they simply happened. Some because they haunted me. Some because they looked meaningless until they started revealing patterns (or perhaps I was hallucinating the patterns, I do not rule out that possibility). And I will not deny it: some are here because they would never be allowed a place in my scientific articles.

So, what will you do with this raw data? Honestly, up to you. You are free to disagree with it, resist it, laugh at it, even misuse it, or find something in it that I did not intend. Raw data is not advice. It is an invitation to process. And processing does not always mean resolving. That is important. I do not want this book to become one more machine for turning pain into a clean moral, or confusion into a tidy conclusion. There is already enough of that in the world. We are always being asked to heal correctly, explain ourselves clearly, become coherent, become whole. I do not know if wholeness is even the right goal, or if it is just another word we use when we are tired of being fragmented. This book is not about becoming whole; it is about what remains when wholeness stops being the goal.

In that sense, this book is itself a contradiction. It questions purpose, and yet here I am, writing it with urgency. It doubts meaning, and yet every page is an attempt to make meaning out of that doubt. I do not think there is anything beautiful about this contradiction (if anything, I find it annoying), and so I will not decorate it into wisdom. It is simply there. And perhaps the real problem is not the contradiction itself, but what it does to a person. If you keep saying that nothing matters, but continue to act as if some things matter deeply, are you lying? Are you weak? Are you secretly hopeful? Or are you simply refusing to admit that perhaps it does not even need to matter for you to keep doing what you are doing?

This is one reason I have always found the Joker's philosophy in The Dark Knight so interesting. Not his actions, of course, but the questions underneath them: What remains when order is exposed as fragile, when morality looks constructed, when the stories people live by begin to crack? There is a logic in some of what he says that is difficult to ignore. I have been obsessed with him for that reason.

And yet a friend once reminded me that, for someone who speaks so much about the Joker, my actions often look embarrassingly more Batman-like. I mentor young students. I built a journal for young physicists because I knew what it felt like to be dismissed for being young. I write about things: physics, meaning, consciousness, death, and whatever else refuses to leave me alone, with the energy of someone trying to file a complaint against existence itself. And I do all of that alongside my academics and research. Not because anyone asked me to and not because it looks good on a CV. But because (according to her) I care deeply, even when I keep insisting that none of this matters in any grand, objective sense. She called me a living contradiction. I hated how accurate that sounded. And no, I did not pretend to hate it while secretly loving it. I actually hated it.

But that hatred also felt like evidence. Not evidence of heroism, and not a confession of secret goodness either. It was evidence of a tension. I can believe that meaning does not exist and still behave as if some things matter. I can doubt purpose and still protect the spaces where young people are allowed to think. I can look at the void and still answer an email, explain an idea, help someone find their confidence, present at conferences, encourage a young student to do physics, write a song, or smile when I picture my fifteen-year-old self looking up at the sky and wondering whether God plays dice. Maybe contradiction is not something to solve immediately. Maybe sometimes it is an important condition under which life continues.

And if that contradiction is where we begin, then the first dream we must give up is the dream that everything will eventually add up. The dream that the mess is only temporary. The dream that somewhere beneath it there is a clean structure waiting to be revealed, or that somewhere above, some god is watching over us. The dream that if we think hard enough, suffer nobly enough, work urgently enough, and love deeply enough, the universe will finally explain itself and justify the absurdity of continuing.

Maybe it is a great dream. But perhaps, it is time to wake up.