Connections in the Age of Hyperconnectivity

Almost every eight to twelve months since twenty-two I try to visit Vienna, Paris and Kardamyli alternatively, looking out for inspiration, doing my own eat, pray and love. It starts by taking a train into the imperial heartland of Austrian high culture. The suave modern architecture, infused with the grandeur of traditional royalty, coffee houses, cosy wine taverns and sunsets from on the top of the Riesenrad - the all so quaint Viennese charm. After a brief pause of a year, I start for the city of love. A stroll through Rue de la B?cherie, rummaging classics at Shakespeare and Company; an afternoon ferry across the Sienne, getting lost in nostalgia and the Notre Dame. Fast-forwarding another year and I find myself savouring fresh fish and some feta cheese salad on a lazy summer day by the beaches of southern Greece. I get back home and count days till I start it all over again. This has been my getaway ritual for the last couple of years, my muse and my experiment in self-actualization. 

"Doesn't it get monotonous, going to the same places over and over again? ", is what the usual bystander at the local pub asks me. Most times I refrain from speaking my mind and submit to the assumptions of my fellow compatriots. But every once in a blue moon I come across a stranger who keeps knocking till, they reach the little red door and lifts the painted veil off the mundane, and into the intricacies of good old-fashioned contemplation. I remember one doubting the intimacy of connections in the age of hyperconnectivity. Amused and bewildered at the same time, she went on about my choices of destinations, and my reasons behind them or if there were any. Why do I keep visiting these three places, do the same things and try to live all the experiences over and over again?  

Nostalgia can be the easy answer and to a certain degree, it may do justice. But you're absolutely correct! If I'm just nostalgic enough to keep purchasing flight tickets to the same exotic European destinations every year, then I'm either a millionaire or downright delusional. Unfortunately, and fortunately, I cannot be ascribed to any of the two. I remember back in the early nineties when my cousin used to visit us from the States, during the holidays and each time we met was as exhilarating as the first. I'm sure neither our lives were out of the ordinary or any different than the next-door kid who used to play chutes and ladders to bed. But all our trivial tales gathered over a year which resembled little irregular pieces of a puzzle when put together had always put a smile to our faces. He turned out to be a sound engineer at Universal, Sony et all, making music and travelling the world yet the feeling nowadays is but a quarter of what we used to have back then. We don't build puzzles anymore; we refresh our daily dosages of Instagram feeds. Perhaps now we know too much of each other and understand too little. 

Anticipation although cherished seems overrated when it comes to practice. The necessity to cut down on short term uncertainty coupled with instant gratification forges a double-edged sword with one sharper than the other. You can blame the asymmetry on the negativity bias! Let's talk a little quantitatively (forgive the mediocrity!) now as we take our skewed sword and wield it every time, we seek gratification. I'd like to borrow a concept of scaling property of randomness from Dr. Nassim Nicholas Taleb where he links pleasure and pain of a fellow investor to the success and failure on an investment having a 15% return over Treasury Bills, with a 10% error rate per annum, a.k.a. volatility. Now with the distribution following the bell curve, the investment has a 93% probability of success annually, giving our friend, the investor 19 pleasurable years for every unsavoury one, for the next 20 year. This could've been the scenario, but our dear friend is in a hyperconnected world with the power to monitor his portfolio every minute, at the tip of his fingers, or even better, at the command of his voice. Narrowing our timescale from a year to a minute, we get the following probabilities of success at different scales:

Scale      Probability

1 year     93%

1 quarter  77%

1 month    67%

1 day      54%

1 hour     51.3%

1 minute   50.17%

1 second   50.02%

Thus what could have been a single year of heartbreak against 19 pleasurable ones, or 4 pangs of pain against 8 delightful months a year, translates to 239 unpleasurable minutes against 241 pleasurable over a day, and 60,271 against 60,688 minutes respectively, over a year ( Dr. Taleb neither prefers more than 8 hours of work per day nor considers more than 260 trading days a year.). Now that's just the exponential increase in the frequency of unsavoury events as we narrow down the timescale from years to months to minutes. We haven't yet configured our lopsided double-edged sword and the asymmetry in magnitude caused by our dear negativity bias!  

Last year an accidental fire took out the spire at Notre Dame. I remember getting lost in its ethereal timelessness. What a pity it didn't turn out to be timeless after all. While I do cherish the fact that I'm amongst the fortunate ones to have experienced its beauty more than once, it's not the incentive of experiencing the transient that spurs my recurrent visits to the same destinations. At the end of every year when I travel to each of these places, I carry with me trifling changes which go unnoticed all the year-round, till I'm on top of the Riesenrad in Vienna, or while sipping coffee at the Le Pure Café in Paris or while hiking past the Kardamyli old town up to the Church of Agia Sophia. It's as if these places are like mirrors that reflect the subtle variations that time etches out, and every visit, every engagement and every interaction produce different outcomes no matter how minuscule the magnitude of variance maybe. And what better example to picture the phenomenon than the connection between two humans moving back and forth with time.

As to why Vienna, Paris and Southern Greece in particular? I guess Mr Linklater will be able to help with that.  

"If there's any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone sharing something. I know, it's almost impossible to succeed but who cares really? The answer must be in the attempt.” 

-       Céline, Before Sunrise.