Disinterest

Let me tell you, I am uninterested.

I read the papers, and the blogs and the FB posts written by my friends; I watch the TV shows and the news and the latest films; and most of the time I am uninterested.

Yes, to be honest, even when we have a chat in the day, it's not unlikely that I'll be thinking, same old same old, what's the point of this conversation anyway? when you tell me that your day has been alright.

And maybe (probably) it's just me, but quite honestly, you don't really care how my day was either. We might find an anecdote amusing, have a laugh, but in the end even that is mediocre. No, the truth is, none of this interests me.

I am more interested in my code, in what the data I'm extracting from stem cells might be than in how your day went, and sometimes I wonder if this makes me a bad person: not caring for the fellow human. But the fact is, I do care about the fellow human.

If you (or the papers) talked to me about injustice (real injustice, not how horrible it is for 30-year-olds to have to move to the north of England because they can't afford London) I'll be there. I want to listen. I want to know what you have to say, I want to know what's happening and I want to hear proposals for solutions, I want to propose solutions myself, and I want to make them happen.

If you talk to me about books, real books, the sort that don't have an agenda and are purely story and human experience, I'll be there, I'll listen, I'll want to know the books you're talking about, I'll want to read them.

Talk to me about music, films, art, but talk to me about those done in pleasure and for pleasure. I don't care for art done with a message (any meaningful art has a message in itself, because any meaningful art is profoundly human).

And last of all: talk to me about science. Talk to me about how doing science rips one apart (trust me, it does, I don't think I've ever seen a higher concentration of stressed people as I see in a lab) and talk to me about how it's exciting and how doing science makes one happy. Talk to me about how the coffee is horrible and the talks put you to sleep, and about how that tiny difference in the numbers which no one else will notice or know about means so much to you (and this sounds idealistic, but there are people out there who love quirks in the numbers that are not significant to anyone else).

I want to open a newspaper and read about how people are suffering police brutality in what we know as "the first world". And I don't want to hear it just one day, I want to hear it every day because it is ongoing. I want to hear how we're destroying the world, how so many species of amphibians are becoming extinct every year (when was the last time that climate change made the headlines?). I want to hear about what's being done to stop world hunger, because I don't hear anyone talking about Somalia, but much less about people in Myanmar who can barely pay for meat, let alone people in countries ravaged by war. And I also want to hear about how in countries in Europe, children are going without food and homes, and without an education.

And yet, I open the newspapers and all I read about is politics.

And they dare to accuse me of being apolitical. Of being disinterested. Of being radicalised.