Choosing my future

I think what I’m really interested in is the human condition. For a while now I’ve been trying to figure out what it was that I was going to study when I went back to university. I mean, I knew I was going back to learn more, I just hadn’t decided what it was that I was going to learn. Now, slowly, I’m starting to figure out what it is.

The books I enjoy reading most, it seems, are those that talk about the human mind, with all its virtues and foibles. It doesn’t matter whether I’m reading philosophy, politics, economics, psychology or seduction, what I always take away and enjoy most from those books is lessons about how we operate and function.

That is what I want to study. I want to study us. Of course, in a roundabout way everything in the social sciences is about us (some would even argue that everything we study is indirectly about us in some way or another), but that’s not what I mean; what I mean is that I want to cut out all the crap and go right to the heart of the matter, the study of us.

That would be psychology. Which is kind of funny, because of the three directions I studied during university (Sociology, Psychology and Political Science) it was psychology that I enjoyed the least. It was too science oriented for me, at the time. I preferred the theory of sociology and political science. Of course, that’s now changed. My mind has become far more analytical and appreciative of scientific research. I’ve come to realise that armchair based thought is great for finding the questions, but isn’t that well suited for doing anything more than philosophising about the answers.

What’s more, many of the questions that we formerly thought were firmly in the field of the theoretical and the philosophical are now being shown to be in the field of the medical and the scientific. The human brain, it turns out, can be subjected to experimentation, just like everything else.

I think the area I would like to focus on is the area of social psychology, as in what is it that happens to us individually when we are in groups. I think, as things stand, that we haven’t thought enough about how we operate on a group level (though recently a great deal of research is being done in that direction), while ultimately we are very much social creatures. I’d even go so far as to say that our ability to socially interact as well as we do has given us our one true advantage over the other animals on this little mud ball.

So that is what it looks like I will go back to Holland to study. That is unless, of course, I get an opportunity to go somewhere else. I’d love to study elsewhere; somewhere, where I haven’t lived before.

But Holland should be alright. It is still, in some strange and bizarre way, the place I call home, even if I haven’t been back in five years.