Tag Archives: life

I didn’t know that I died when I was 30

6 Replies

How many people in this world achieved amazing results within the first 3 decades of their lives? Alexander the Great by the age of thirty, had created one of the largest empires of the ancient world. Jesus Christ died around 30. Albert Einstein conceived in his mind his most important theories, before 30. Nikola Tesla also achieved his most important inventions during 3 decades, and many others. 30 years is a life, an entire life. No more than 200 years ago, life expectancy was around 40. That means one life! Nowadays life expectancy in the industrialized world is 2 or 3 times that, which means, at least two lives in one!

Culture and society understands life as a progressive path with goals down the road to achieve. Birth, Education, Job, Family, Old Age and Death. All this on a “life spam”, but it doesn’t specify time. So what about if we extend our lives up to 120 years? That means that we again start to work before 25, and keep working until we retire, let’s say 90… Does it make any sense? So, let’s face it. We humans can achieve whatever we want, in the first 30 years of our live. We can change the world in just 3 decades!

So, I propose to change our vision to a new way to understand life and goals. I’m 36 at the moment I’m writing this. If I assume my symbolic death when I was 30, it means that now I’m 6 years old. But I don’t need to go to elementary school and I don’t have to deal with all the obstacles of my lack of experience as a 6 year old child. I want to imagine, that I woke up and now I’m 6 years old but I have all the knowledge that I’ve accumulated in my first 30 years of life.
I already spent one life, whatever I did it’s done, I can’t change it. But, I can learn from that life experience for my new life that’s started 6 years ago and I just didn’t know. So instead of start thinking in terms of “I’m too old now”, “I lost the train and the opportunity to do this or that…”, “I can’t start a new career now”… I will think in terms of “I’m 6 years old and I know a lot!!, I still have one more life left in this video game”.

So that’s it, I’m still in the middle of the road of my life, that means I have just made the 50% of it. We can start over again, planning again, studying again, doing again whatever we want and work for this second chance we have.

If you are in your 30s think about this: you just started your clock again and you maybe didn’t realize about it. If you are in your 40s, you are just about 10 years old! You still have a life ahead so don’t loose the illusion. If you are far away from that, remember that at 60, you will die again, and a third chance is given to you, so don’t waste it, because that’s the last one, at least based on our current medical advances :)

This is my exercise for this 2012. Realize that I died at 30, I’m 6 years old, and my life started again. Let’s take a break, and rethink about everything. I have the opportunity to make it again, better and more interesting than before. Go ahead and do the same. Think about what you have done until now and if you are not satisfied with it, now it’s the moment to start anew!

Good luck!

bye bye 2010

10 Replies

Here we are again starting to write the end of the year post. Last year I wrote a similar post but it was in a different blog, a photography blog that actually I only use for photography purposes, here. I have to admit that I didn’t pay enough attention to this blog during the last year. 2010 was a really busy year, many changes, some deceptions, some great things but an average it wasn’t so bad.

I would like to share what I learned during this year and what I shouldn’t repeat the next one. Maybe these impressions and experiences will be useful for some of you, at least I hope so.

Work:

This was my last year working for AXA, an insurance company where I helped with everything related to Linux and Open Source. It was a good experience, after 3 years working for an insurance company I learned that intercultural working environments could be more difficult for adaption than just a foreign environment of only one different nationality.
In AXA I had the opportunity to work with many people of different nationalities: Indians, Chinese, Korean and Japanese. The adaptation process changed depending on the nationality. We used English as a common language, it wasn’t the native language of anybody. So at the end the conclusion was: It doesn’t matter if people speak the same language, “culture” is the main topic to be understood to reach a real communication.

Sometime ago I thought that international environments were good to increase communication and the exchange of cultures among people. That’s still true and that is a priceless experience. But also it has the disadvantage of spending a lot of time to fix, correct and understand what is really going on. The same phrase could have different meanings among cultures, even body language turns out to be as important as the spoken one. All these differences, very interesting from a self enrichment point of view, imply a big spent of time dealing with all the cultural issues of international environments.

So from this multicultural experience in AXA I learned that for a tech working environment, where dynamism and quick action is a main requirement, mixing everybody in the same communication layer could be a mistake. It could be much more productive to create nationality layers with people that act as a communication hubs between different groups. So people can concentrate on their tasks and relax forgetting all the issues related with cultural differences.

It was a really good experience for me but I can’t deny that it took a lot of time for me to figure out all that cultural information. Anyway, now I got used to it, so it won’t be an issue for me anymore, but for somebody else starting for the first time it could be a big deal.

Those 3 years are gone. I will start 2011 working for GXS a B2B leader company doing a completely different job. Thanks AXA for the time being, but it’s time for me to move on.

Blogging, Social Networking and Web2.0

During this year I changed a lot the approach about Social Networking, Blogging and all Web2.0 related behavior. I learned that having a lot of followers in Twitter is meaningless as far as they don’t really follow what you say. Why we start following someone means a very different reason for everyone of us. Nobody truly fully understood what is the right thing to do to have more followers yet. Also having thousands of followers doesn’t mean that our voice will be heard by all of them. One thing is the number of our followers and another thing is how many of them really read what we say.

Blogging is alive and despite of many opinions out there saying that blogs are dead, I think that it is and it still will be, for a long time, one of the main portals for our digital personality. Before the micro-blogging and life-streaming era, there was no other way to share our lives online, except a static web, and later a blog. Actually, the decrease in numbers of blogs just means that blogs are getting more serious, more blog focused and that people that abandoned blogs to just exists only on Twitter, Facebook, Buzz or any other SNS is because they didn’t find in a dedicated blog the right environment to share.

What 2011 is preparing?

Almost ready, a couple of projects that @depepi and I are working on, will see the light in 2011. It’s still a secret anyway it will be announced soon :)

Also my feelings are that the job market in Japan will be a little more open and more opportunities are to come during this year. At least in the IT sector.

A kind of magician I talked to in the street said to me that the year of the Rabbit is going to be a year of changes, like a rabbit changing quickly from one location to another… let’s see if it will be right. Anyway, many things are going on and honestly I doubt that anybody is really able to make a prediction. We are in a time where history is helpless to make any prediction because never ever before people was able to communicate as fast and border-less as today.
But please don’t forget what history still can teach us: Governments and greedy organizations that base their power on fear and ignorance will always try to keep people from evolve and move freely. So let’s work together to keep the status of freedom we have now and to improve it, and never let it come back to the dark ages that some few people with personal interest are trying to do.

Cases like Wikileaks shouldn’t happen in a civilized and democratic society. Freedom of speech and movements that help to show out what some governments do using illegal practices should be protected.

Because of this, I feel that 2010 wasn’t a good year for Net Neutrality, Freedom of Speech and the Internet in general. Let’s make 2011 much better!

Thanks to my Friends!

During this year I was really lucky to have friends that helped me out with advices, smiles, stories, and just with their company. It doesn’t matter if physically or virtually, their support was always really appreciated.

I can’t put somebody as first or second, so let’s use alphabetical order:

Alvaro Correal (Facebook)
Thanks for your help and your advices. I can’t count the many times you helped me in my job with your technical advices. Also thanks for staying there despite the distance!

Andrea Ortolani
Thanks for bringing here in Tokyo that piece of Italy that I miss so much. I can’t remember how many laughs we had this year and I hope to have many more in 2011!

Danny Choo ( Blog | twitter )
Thanks for your advices on how to run ones own business.
You are my web guru by all means!

David Santo Orcero ( blog )
Thank you for priceless help and experience.
You know you are my personal guru for almost any important decision I take!

Dean Fuji ( twitter )
Thanks for your help introducing me to so many good people and interesting events.
It’s always nice to hang out with you in the Tokyo IT night scene.

Derek Arnwine ( Twitter | Flickr )
Thank you for sharing so many good ideas and photography projects. I hope 2011 will be our photo-year!

Florian von Bock ( twitter )
Thanks for your advices to be a freelancer in Tokyo. Really appreciate!
Don’t forget the Yakiniku in Asakusa!

Francesco Fondi ( blog | twitter )
Porco Dio!! Thank you for your help expanding my vision about so many things, Internet, Social Networking and Publishing. I hope to see you soon here again in Tokyo.
Also thanks for bringing here that peace of Rome that I also miss so much!

Jim Grisanzio ( Twitter | Blog )
I hope for you all the best on 2011. This was the year of the storm, after it the calm is coming. Thank you for being one of the oldest friends I have in Tokyo. You know that you always have my support.

Jose Maria Atencia
Thank you for no matter what, you are always the same as 6 years ago when we met! We are battle partners in the war we faced in our job.

Jose Moreno ( blog | Flickr )
Thank you for your photography advices. I learned so much form your experience behind the camera. I hope to show you so many places to photograph in Tokyo some day!

Juan Enrique Macias ( twitter )
Thank you for the big professional change for next year. You know what I mean.
You know you have my support for your future projects on 2011!

Oren Magut ( twitter | Flickr )
So when are we going to take that Yakiniku in Asakusa with Florian!!?
Thank you for your never-ending energy and ideas!

Paul Papadimitriou ( Twitter | Blog )
Thank you for keeping this friendship no matter the distance. I hope for you the best on 2011. Your countless advices helped me to see opportunities and new challenges where before I saw only difficulties. Thanks my friend!

Richard Smith
Thank you for the dedication and time spent in our studies. You are one of the most well educated persons I know in Tokyo.

Steve Nagata ( Twitter | Blog )
I can’t just count how many times you literally showed me that I was wrong. Thank you for your help, for your patience and for your priceless time.

Tack Narita (成田健) ( twitter | Flickr )
Thank you for your trust in my ability as a photographer and for your help in improving the technique.

Happy new year to everybody!!

We forgot the sound of silence

Leave a reply

Today I had I blackout operation in my office. It’s something implemented by Japanese law to test buildings infrastructure in case of a cut in the main power.
When the electricity went down, I could realize the huge difference between “ordinary” silence and some “real” silence. Well, I shouldn’t call it real silence, maybe it’s better to say a better silence. Years ago people didn’t have any computers on their desks, so I tried to imagine how it would be to work without any fan or any electrical vibrations that come from, not only my own desktop, but from many machines surrounding me. It was a beautiful instant of mental peace that I didn’t experimented in a long time.
Stop the fans! I cannot see any real technological progress when the living conditions get degraded instead of improved. From a productivity point of view, and a business point of view, the operations done nowadays are many orders of magnitude above if compared to those of just 30 years ago, but what about the quality of the working environment?

I don’t want to sound against technological advance, but my understanding is that technology should be something that would make our lives easier, better and safer. Let’s compare the the light of a oil lamp, so relaxing, so eyes-friendly and the fluorescent tubes (neon tubes) in almost every office. Let’s compare the silence of a library with some people chatting and the constant non-stop noise of a fan and air conditioning. I don’t see a real effort to improve this, people just get used to these noises and we all think it’s normal until we finally have the opportunity to find few moments of no-machines around.

A real advance is that of having an artificial light, much better and healthy than a natural one. A real advance is that of having machines with no mechanical and movable parts, like fans, hard-drives and so forth. Also interferences can be noticed. Everybody can feel the vibrations of a CRT monitor or a power supply, and we are getting used to that noise.

The day we will be surrounded by technology and at the same time feel in the same way as we were in a calm wood, that will be a mark to say “this is a real improvement”.

Live forever?

10 Replies

Do you know this guy? His name is Aubrey de Grey he is convinced that people can live forever and he leaders a project to try to make it possible.
I found this documentary about him pretty interesting, specially because it let us enter in the discussion about the consequences to live forever or even hundreds of years.

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-3329065877451441972&hl=en&fs=true

I was thinking about a few of them:

1. Older people has a huge advantage in terms of experience respect young. In the opposite side they lack of all the strong and physical energies of young ones. In an environment where the body have a big role for subsistence, the older you are, the less possibilities to survive. But at the same time the more tricks you know about how to survive. But what about if the body does not change at all? You do not die at all? Always young and more experienced every day. The advantage respect younger will increase indefinitely and more the time passes, the more the life will became difficult for the new comers to participate in the constant race this world is immersed in. For example, imagine to be born in a society with people that have 200 hundred years more experience than others, or even more. They will become an incredible font of knowledge and inspiration for many others but at the same time if those people have bad intentions it would be really hard to even understand for the younger how much controlled they could be.
So the society would be divided in people with more and less experience. The money, the intelligence, anything can not fight against the experience and the knowledge of life. At this point there is one more questions that we can think of as obvious.

2. How much could a human learn? 100 hundred years old people are an example that an entire life is far away from that supposed limit. Many of them still remember absolutely everything about their lives and make pretty logic and have good reasoning. So if we could take away all the senility lack from their bodies those people would be able to still learn and get more experience. So where is the limit? Nobody knows. The possible limits could demonstrate one important thing in all human history. It would demonstrate, for instance, that if the intelligence, memory and everything we are, reside into the brain or somewhere else, that would mean that the brain would be us. If so, it should have a memory limit, a learning limit. As we learn new things, we forget other things. Anyway, anything can get totally lost and sometimes making some relationships we are able to remember something that was apparently totally lost. The only thing we never get enough experienced in and never forget is experience itself. Some people said that 10 years is the minimum time to get expertise in some art or technique. But what about life experience? A 100 year old person, even if he/she is terrible ignorant and had never ever get out from his/her little town, can give me a lesson of life that I would never even imagine. That learning increase year after year… Then, what if we could live forever, there would there be some limitation?

3. Population would become a big problem. Technology can help on that, just increasing the places available to live and to find ways to find all the resources we could need. Specially with a non dying population, scientists and researchers would have more time to discover other ways to support that kind of society.

4. Value of death. Actually is something accepted that people have to die someday. But in a society where death is something not belonging to any natural process, the idea of death would get a totally different meaning. The sorrow for someone’s death would become an unsurmountable lost.

5. What about religions? Almost all religions would lack of any meaning in that society and the possibility to live almost indefinitely would bring new ideas and philosophies.

6. What about economy and possessions? People could accumulate infinite resources. The meaning of money, work and inheritance would change radically. The society would need to find other ways to make people work and money won’t be more a acceptable excuse to do it.

Personally I disagree with people that disagree with the idea of Dr. Aubrey de Grey. If he can make it, all the collateral problems are irrelevant compared to the advantages.