Seeing a Life Lived Backwards

A friend of mine has a quote from Kierkegaard that attaches itself to all the emails he sends. Although I often skim over any “clever” quote that someone has as their signature, or at the very least read it and roll my eyes, I’ve seen this one so many times now it’s stuck in my mind: "Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards". I have obviously resigned this little snippet of philosophy to the back of my mind only to find it resurface the other day when I experienced something that made me understand exactly what Kierkegaard meant.

A few days ago, I discovered a useful little guide on how to set up a GMail account so that it can send and receive mails from a hotmail account. On the face of it, this may sound a little pointless, but for me, this was a good idea. I’ve had my hotmail address since I was about 14 but hotmail and I had a little falling out around about the time the spam hit. Although the majority of people know that I never check my hotmail any more, I do still get the occasional thing there so every now and then I do end up checking it, and the experience becomes a little bit like my shopping trips: I know exactly what I want to get so it’s a process of getting in and getting out as soon as possible. GMail on the other hand has a fantastic interface and is able to reasonably differentiate between spam and emails that I would like to read, so combining this with the necessity of the hotmail address is a perfect solution. However, although setting this up was easy enough, it had an unexpected side effect.

Maybe it was what was supposed to happen, maybe it was an option I accidentally checked, or maybe it was just planetary alignment but my GMail account very slowly downloaded every single email from my hotmail account from most recent to most distant. It should also be worth mentioning that apparently, the last time I cleared out my hotmail address was in 2004.

I saw my life for the past four years crawl past me in email form. Backwards.

At first, as they trickled in I just deleted them or archived them without really paying attention. These were things I’d dealt with fairly recently or things that were going on at the moment or had happened in the recent past, but the further it started going back, the more I waited on each item before archiving it. At first, it was reading the subject lines and involuntarily remembering what was going on back then. Then it was re-reading entire conversations that I’d had at certain points. The overall experience was bizarre, because every time you read something from your past, you are faced with the contradiction of knowing how things eventually turned out and remembering how it felt not knowing.

In life, when we look back at the past, we always remember it with a rose tinted view. It’s unavoidable that nostalgia kicks in and makes us remorseful that things had to change and that things aren’t like the way they were in “the good old days”. I’ll frequently look back at my university days and have to remind myself that although there were some really genuinely good moments, there was a lot of waiting around, uncertainty and general melancholy as well. Viewing your life through emails, you see everything and are reminded of everything, bad times and all.

Although there was a fantastic spree of emails between Fien and I when we first met, going back further saw emails on how an ex-girlfriend and I had split up, a little further and there was the dissolution of Salisbury Road, further still a falling out with a good friend and attached to all of this came reminders of what I was and wasn’t doing at the time which drove home the point that “I could have handled things better”. Hindsight is always a glorious thing, and this is what I interpret Kierkegaard to mean by only understanding life backwards. Although it’s good to see that even after some poor moments I’ve still come out of things ok with the help of good and over all understanding friends, for example all of us from Salisbury Road are on good talking terms even if we don’t see each other much any more, it was still a rattling experience.

I have a different friend who always used to keep an extensive diary, every single email and even wrote up texts into a giant excel spreadsheet. I’m not sure if he still does this, but I could never do this. The way I get through life and the way I think you’re supposed to get through life is by moving on and leaving things behind you. Learning from your mistakes is one thing, dwelling on them is another, and recording them so you can dwell on them later is probably somewhere inbetween.

Although this was a morbidly fascinating experience, I don’t want this to happen again any time soon. It’s not just that life has to be lived forward, it’s that it should be lived forward.



Additional Notes:

I say I understand exactly what Kierkegaard meant, but what I really mean is I think I understand. I asked a philosopher friend once if they knew much about Kierkegaard and their response was something along the lines of “Yes. It’s very strange.” As academic analysis goes, that’s remarkably succinct and to the point.

Just on the off chance that the provider of said quote-at-bottom-of-email scenario is reading this, I’m not having a dig at you for quoting something interesting on your emails, just the general mentality of putting a quote as your signature. It so very rarely comes across as anything but pretentious or nauseating. So long as it’s not song lyrics, I suppose we’re ok.

If the only thing you’ve taken from this post is “hey cool, you can do that with GMail?” don’t feel guilty because that’s exactly what I would think. The guide on how to do it can be found here.

Adapting a Student Lifestyle to a Post-Student Lifestyle

One of the most jarring things about going from a student to a graduate for me was the change in lifestyle. The way that I’ve adapted my life to fit around work and a slightly stricter timetable isn’t perfect and I’m sure it could have been done better by someone with more willpower, but it works for the most part.

I am aware that not everyone had the same student experience as me. Some people took a much more serious approach to studying, some people locked themselves in a room eschewing all social contact, and some people threw themselves into every single student society possible leaving no room for pub-based socializing. This probably won’t apply to any of those lifestyles or make sense to you if you are one of those people. Also, this isn’t a way of me saying that I think you’re wrong, just that you've had a different student experience.

My advice to anyone who is trying to break out of a student routine that was similar to mine and into a more professional routine is as follows:

Find a balance. You should know what you can and can’t do, so don’t deny yourself a night out, but just know when is a good time to finish. Staying out all night will undoubtedly catch up with you if you do it too much. Of course, a lack of sleep affects different people in different ways, but it can also be subtle in the way it affects you. You may not realize that you’re not functioning as per usual or that it’s taking you an extra couple of seconds to answer questions that have been put to you.

Hangovers are not your friend. A recent medical report has said that there is no cure for a hangover, but I’m fairly confident that we all have ways of avoiding them that are moderately effective. The best one is of course to not drink, but that’s the boring sort of thing that a parent or a policeman might say, so I understand it's effectiveness and uselessness at the same time. Other methods involve lots of water, pre-emptive painkillers, fatty food, more drinking or staying up so late that the alcohol seamlessly processes itself. I probably wouldn’t recommend the last two for a subsequent release into a working environment.

Find a way of getting up in the morning that works for you. Lying in until the last minute and then having to rush around is no good. You can get away with turning up to a lecture disheveled and reeking of beer, but the slow-witted quick-to-comment colleagues you collect in an office might make mention of it in that irritating faux-sarcastic manner. Time to clean up a little in the mornings is pretty useful and not having to rush around puts you in a better and more mellow mood.

Eat Breakfast. This makes a massive difference. It’s not just subversive marketing by Kellogs that suggests breakfast is important, it really is a life-saver of a meal. Something to wake you up is also good and whereas I’m not going to tout a caffeine addiction, I have to say that I am a different person without that first cup of tea.


Last night reminded me of the way I used to live, as I went out with some friends and probably drank a bit too much. As I said before, I know not everyone has had the same student experience, but mine took me to a lot of pubs and bars at least three times a week. My nights out would also almost always involve very late nights that would occasionally continue once I got home through to four o clock in the morning. A couple of times it even got to the point whereby the sun was starting to come up and I decided that there probably wasn’t much point in sleeping anyway and I have now found out that after about thirty six hours, I involuntarily fall asleep.

This morning also reminded of the way I failed to adapt early on in my working life. I wouldn’t say that I have a hangover, but my brain does feel a little bit like over-cooked rice; all my thoughts are sticking together and several of them are welded to the bottom of my skull. I remember having this sort of feeling when I was still making sales over the phone and I remember it being deeply unpleasant. The morning after a night out is always enough to make you swear off never going again and for me, it has got to the point where I’ll start seriously thinking about how things will be in the morning whilst I’m still drinking. Maybe that’s a sign of adaptation, maybe it’s a sign of growing older and more responsible, I’m not sure.

Everyone is going to have different routines and capabilities. How far your life adapts or needs to adapt is also dependant on how lenient your job is, or even what your job is. I’m approaching this from the standard viewpoint of nine until five hours, but different hours will inevitably invite different lifestyles. It’s best to find what’s right for you and don’t be surprised if you don’t get it right first time. It will take a good few months at least to get used to the change.


Additional Notes:

Apparently, only being able to stay awake for thirty six hours makes me somewhat of a lightweight but it’s not something I necessarily want to work on. A recent adventure to Belgium and back on a six to eight hour coach journey in which one could only take short naps before being interrupted by an inconvenient ferry trip and all the complications surrounding boarding, traveling on and disembarking the said ferry taught me that I could probably stay up much longer if I cheated and took short naps throughout the day. The blog I mentioned a few days ago has an interesting article on Polyphasic sleep patterns that might be worth trying some day.

Ironically enough, I made more sales when I was hung over. My theory on this is that nobody really wants to buy insurance from someone who sounds overly polite and cheery, because they instantly think it’s some kind of fraud. Maybe they’ve read the KPMG profile of a Fraudster that I mentioned the other day, but regardless of the reason, more people seem to buy things from someone that sounds like their spirit has been crushed.

I am clearly bitter that my flat mates can have a lie in after a night like last night. The night was fantastic, as we went to my old university’s comedy night and saw a forgettable but passable female working class comic, whose jokes seemed entirely based around the fact that she was female, working class, or female and working class, we saw Dave Gorman who was unbelievably funny, and an up and coming group called “Pappy’s Fun Club” that was so unexpectedly brilliant that my cheeks still hurt from laughing. I even got a hug from compare Alex Zane who then looked as confused/drunk as I felt.

I was however sensible/boring and came home before going with the others to the student union bar that stayed open late. My main motivation behind that was because the union bar on a Wednesday night is normally full of drunken rugby players, who by eleven are predominantly naked. Nobody needs that.

Issues of Naivety and Trust

Due to a mixture of a rarefied existence at university and a natural lack of life experience, I often find myself assuming that everyone is trustworthy and deep down a generally good person. I often find myself saying “oh, but they’re ok really” and I’ve recently started to wonder if that’s always going to be the case.

This sentiment is often called naivety, but it made me think that maybe it’s not such a bad thing. It could be that the basic levels of trust are what gets us through society as a whole and maybe this naivety is just a good intention to get through life as smoothly as possible. I’m confident in the fact that even people that you couldn’t possibly describe as naive get caught out by people betraying them or otherwise acting in an untrustworthy manner, so maybe on some level we just need to forget about it, get past it and just hope we don’t get stung.

The following quote is from KPMG’s profile of a Fraudster published in 2007:
“Why are people often caught unaware when somebody is accused of fraud? Because it
is usually the colleague who is known to be helpful, polite and inconspicuous.
But most importantly it is the colleague that enjoys the absolute trust of both
superiors and colleagues.”

This is quite a frightening summary, and if we are to believe it, it means we need to become entirely self reliant in all matters and probably go and live in a cave, fending for ourselves for fear that the mild mannered guy who does all the printing might be the one stealing your sandwiches. Let the quote sink in for a while and you realise that what it is telling you is that those most likely to betray you are those that inspire the most trust in you.

It’s clear that everyone gets caught out. The number of frauds that take place on a daily basis are staggering and we’ll probably be seeing a lot more of them coming to light as we hit the recession, as the majority of frauds always come to light when money is a little bit more scarce. I’m guessing that this is because people start looking at their account books a little closer only to notice a few holes, and the most famous recent holes in account books started to become apparent around 20 years ago on the last market slump, such as the Robert Maxwell pension scandal, and we’ve already had some crackers in the financial crisis leading to our current recession, such as Bernard Madoff, whose fraud can no longer be called a fraud, but more of a lifetime achievement.

Despite massive frauds taking place on a daily basis, trust isn’t a bad thing. It is required for a smooth running of society after all. You have to trust the postman to deliver your letters, the bank manager to direct your finances without skimming bits off the top, the insurance company not to steal your credit card details when you give it to them over the phone, your contractors not to swipe your beer from the fridge, and your government not to give away your personal details, including the names, addresses and private phobias of your children. Whether or not you can trust them is irrelevant, you have to trust them on some level, other wise it all falls apart and you have to move in to that aforementioned cave.

I’m not saying that we should all live with our heads in the sand. It is clear in some situations that you shouldn’t hand money over for something. I’m not saying that you should respond to all those “update your information” requests that get emailed to you from “Loylds” or “Bralcays” or “Hallifacts” bank, or that you should give money to the Nigerian colonel in order to unfreeze his assets, but at the same time, try to have a little faith in the rest of humanity. I hate to go on about it, but my adventure with the washing machine generated a lot of distrust towards the man I was buying it from and in all sensibility I should have walked away, but as a result of having a little faith, I do now have a functioning washing machine and clean underwear again.

With the quote above in mind, look twice at the mild mannered man in grey who never offends but that just seems like a cog in the machine, but remember that not everyone is a fraudster and the majority of people are still for the most part good and deserve your trust.

Additional Notes:

Bernard Madoff: the man with the most comical name for a fraudster embezzling money. Really though, once you get to swiping fifty billion dollars before anyone notices, that’s undeniably talented.

You’ll notice I painfully avoided the phrase “Credit Crunch”. I can’t stand it. What’s even worse is that at some point I heard a stupid joke referring to a cereal called “Credit Crunch” and now all I can see when someone says something about financial complications, is a bowel of cornflakes.

Getting Through Boring Commitments

We’ve all been stuck in situation where time appears to have actually started going in reverse. The following short tips can apply to pretty much anything, be it a board meeting, a tutorial or lecture for a much loathed subject, or even family commitments that you couldn’t think of a decent excuse to get out of in time.

1) Don’t watch the clock: This is my absolute number one rule to avoid time slowing down. Stop watching the time. A watched clock becomes insecure and stops ticking out of fear that you’re eyeballing it for making too much noise. I regularly glance at my watch thirty minutes into an hour long lecture only to find that the next thirty minutes feel like days.

2) Preparation: This is another one of those things where I find myself not practicing what I preach. A little preparation for whatever it is you’re about to go in to can go a long way. Even if it takes half an hour out of your schedule before hand, you will consider that time well spent once you’re able to use that preparation, as it will make the time fly past if you have a vague idea about what is going on.

3) Be interested: If you pretend to show an interest, you might inadvertently become interested and once you become interested you’ll probably uncover all sorts of new information that you wouldn’t have found otherwise that you would genuinely consider interesting anyway. You often get out of something what you put in and a positive attitude will normally yield positive results.

In my own experience, I have often had problems getting through Tutorials in an academic scene. These often take a topic from a lecture and force a discussion about the topic in a small group of about twenty people. This requires you to know the subject in order to participate in the session and the hour can turn into torture once it becomes apparent that nobody has done any of the required background reading. These sessions have traditionally been ones that I have eyeballed the clock into submission, attended unprepared, and have not been interested. Recently, I’ve been preparing more, I’ve not been watching the clock and I’ve been pretending to show an interest and miraculously enough, it’s worked and even the driest subjects have actually started becoming quite engaging. Even the law of Equity and Trusts has become at least partially interesting and Equity and Trust law is far from interesting.

These three little points are nothing earth shatteringly original, I realize that, but I actually first discovered that they work when I was asked to stand in for my boss on a management meeting. Management meetings are particularly dry affairs that managers tend to dread, as they have a tendency to run for over three hours, but I loved it and it went by remarkably quickly because I was prepared, interested and I didn’t watch the clock.

This again probably boils down to the idea of making the best of a bad situation. As tempting as it is to sit around whistling “always look on the bright side of life”, I realize it’s not all sunshine and optimism, but a little of the latter can go a long way.


Additional Notes:

Just a quick disclaimer to any family who may be reading this, by family commitments you can’t get out of, I’m certainly not relating any personal experience there, nor am I suggesting that it was an excuse that I used to get out of your last barbeque; the dog really had eaten my shoes. Honest.

I also fall apart in tutorials because I can’t bear awkward silences, which normally results in me trying to answer something that I have absolutely no knowledge about, thus humiliating myself and turning the awkward silence into an awkward conversation, which is only a minor improvement.

Admittedly, I loved the management meeting because I could believe for three hours that I was important and had a higher salary than I actually do. It’s always good to day dream.

The Problems with Preparing for Exams

Whenever I’ve taken an exam, I’ve always found that I’ve never done enough preparation for it or that I’ve over prepared the wrong bits. Those first few seconds when everyone turns over the first page of their exam booklet to frantically find a question they feel they can answer is always followed by an almost audible collective slap as palms of hands connect with faces throughout the exam hall in despair, as they’ll always be one question that you’re just not sure if you’ve done enough work for.

I took a Statutory Analysis exam a couple of days ago. This was a slightly odd one in that it was an online multiple choice test that you had to sit down and complete in two hours completely uninterrupted. I was given a deadline of the 29th January to complete this, and against all tradition, I got it out of the way over a week early, purely because I got sick of preparing and worrying about it.

I absolutely abhor the anticipation-dread that one goes through on the run up to any exam or assessment of any kind. I actually normally do quite well in exams, but this knowledge that I perform quite well under pressure still doesn’t stop me from automatically tying knots in my stomach and getting incrementally more aggressive and moody the closer I get to the day of the exam. The main cause of this is undoubtedly the sheer uncertainty about the content.

Although you can get a rough idea about the sorts of things that will come up from past papers if they’re available, they are often inconsistent. Also, if you look at these, you can’t help but try to work out if the same topics will come up again this time around and whether it may be best to tactically avoid those areas of study. Not only that, but there’s always the risk that a topic that has only been asked for a vague outline in the past will suddenly require you to delve in to an unprecedented level of detail when it comes to your exam.

The level of detail that I go in to during my revision is never enough and the only time I will ever realise that is when I’m sat down in the exam trying to answer the question. It’s always too late, but I always find myself being able to picture the exact page that my notes are in, or the exact layout of the text book, desperately trying to peer through my brain fog and reach the precious text that lies beneath.

Maybe the answer to exams is to do exactly what I do and just get on with it, otherwise you’ll waste time. An exam is a throw-away piece of work that is just a check that you were listening anyway and nobody’s exam scripts are of publishing quality, nor are they expected to be. With this in mind, so long as you have been paying attention to at least some of your lessons, you should be able to pass without issue.


Additional Notes:

Multiple choice exams always catch me out, because I, like almost everyone else, assume that a multiple choice exam will be much easier than any other exam. In a way, this is true, but I always find the pattern is the same: You read the question, you answer the question, you spend the next five minutes changing your mind and second guessing yourself. The agonizing thing about multiple choice exams is that you know the answer is in front of you. It’s horrifying to realise that you have the question and you have the answer in front of you on the same page already and yet you still can’t get it right.
This online test could not be interrupted by anything, and a temperamental internet connection could have cost me a lot of marks. I was almost tempted to use my inconsistent internet connection that I have at home, just so that I could be furious about it and complain to my ISP about something new, but I could see that wouldn’t be constructive.

The Fallacy of University

I don’t regret going to university, but I would have done if the only thing I got out of it was of an academic nature. Through the use of my psychic intuition, I get the impression that a lot of people that have been to university probably feel the same way.

The very nature of academia can seem shallow to those not entirely immersed in the student ethos. I got through university and was spat out the other side with a good degree, but during the process, I got by on the bare minimum. I saw people killing themselves with stress, worry and sleep deprivation in order to keep up with the recommended reading and ending up with the same grade as me. However, without that wider reading, the academic experience is undeniably going to be a shallow one and for me, all it became was a series of skin-deep essays and exams. I didn’t do spectacularly well in any of them, but I did well enough to get the same classifications as those of my colleagues who had eaten drank and slept the world of Ancient History for the full three years. The frustrating thing is that I was a bad student in reality but on paper I was one of the best. The call for decrying the numerical grading systems of the academic world is a subject for another day, but how can someone really assess a person’s mastery over the discipline of History or any of the more subjective arts subjects with a score between one and one hundred?

The academic side of things is obviously not the only reason that people go to university, even if it should be the main reason. There are a lot of good things that one can get out of the university experience. It is a time when you are among several like minded individuals who you should get along with, societies could lend weight to an existing interest or allow you to try out new things that could become valuable to you later in life, and the experience of living away from home but still retaining a certain degree of a safety net is invaluable. I owe my independent lifestyle that I have at the moment to being able to face the real world one step at a time through the university experience and then put it all together after graduation.

I find it a real shame that there is such a massive drive to get everyone going to university. This isn’t sour grapes in the sense that I feel the experience should be more exclusive, but I feel that it shouldn’t be mandatory. We all know people that have gone to university that are either not capable of meaningful studying or just wouldn’t get anything out of it and so many people get pushed into it by schools, parents and the government when what they would really benefit from is starting work or learning a different kind of skill. I’m sure a lot of school leavers end up going to university because they feel they have to and that they would be a failure if they didn’t.

I have a friend that joined the police instead of going to university. As it happens, this friend was more than capable of university level of study, but he wouldn’t have gotten as much out of it as he has done with the police force, because he is perfectly suited to the job; He has good presence and charisma, he’s remarkably good with people, he’s strong and confident and he has enough intelligence to understand what’s going on. If we had more police officers like him, the country would be a much safer place. If more people followed paths that they were more suited to, we would have a country that would make a lot more sense.

If you don’t feel you got what you wanted to out of university, it’s not too late to follow your dreams and expectations. It may be time to take up part time studying as I so strongly advocate (see my ramblings on the matter here) but for me, I’m going to be happy with the fact that I did at least get something out of it and wasn’t purely there because I thought I had to be. I know people who want to get into radio and so spent their university life running the studio, gaining a vast amount of knowledge and huge number of contacts, I know people who wanted to get into journalism that spent their time snooping around the university digging up a surprising amount of dirt and I know people that wasted their time and didn’t get anything out of their three years, but it doesn’t matter what you have done, it’s what you do with it that will count.

Any graduate out there may think that they’re at a significant advantage to non-graduates in the job market. In my albeit limited experience, I would argue that the playing field is a lot more level than you may think.


Additional Notes:
Academia should be the driving force behind going to university, but I did meet someone who never intended to study in the first place. He attended the first year of his university six times, using it as some kind of expensive holiday reosrt, before ending up having to work twelve hour shifts without holidays or weekends for the following four years in order to pull himself out of debt. The interesting thing is that he didn’t regret a second of it.

I actually had a radio show at university as well. It was great fun to do but just occasionally you would find yourself suddenly realizing that you were sat in a small dingy basement room, listening to music and talking to yourself.