I decided to study physics when I was sixteen. At that age, the world felt like a grand mechanical puzzle to be solved, not an experience to be lived or a meaning to be sought. My attention was drawn entirely to ideas—pure ideas—and to the beauty of the universe as revealed through them. I was captivated not only by physics itself, but by the romanticism surrounding the pursuit of truth. I remember many late nights, after everyone else was asleep, looking at the stars through my cramped dorm window, books scattered around me, sometimes until dawn. I was mesmerized by the beauty of the simple principles that move the universe—and by the miracle that the human mind could comprehend them in the first place. The lives of the great thinkers of science—their solitude, their fierce devotion to truth—seemed to me the highest calling. I even embraced a kind of youthful celibacy, believing that the pure pursuit of knowledge required such single-mindedness.

Now, at nearly thirty, I still love physics and still shudder at the wonder of the cosmos. I still delight in foundational questions and find meaning in the clarity and mystery that physics offers. But over the last decade, I have learned something equally important—something I never knew to factor into my decisions when I was younger.

I lack a sense of community.

By community, I don’t mean simply collaborators. I mean a shared communal experience—something that grounds whatever is being pursued in the broader human experience, values, and emotional life. I don’t want a life where I float in symbols during the day, treating them as tasks, as career-building acts, or as contributions to narrow dogmatic schools of thought, only to return home feeling entirely disconnected from it all. I don’t want dual identities. I want to come home and feel a continuation of what I did in the morning—and to feel that continuation through the whole fabric of my life.

Throughout my academic journey, I have had no collaborators and no intellectual companions with whom I could grow. The only “community” I felt connected to was the lineage of great scientists of the past—people who inspired me but who are, of course, all gone. Still, a few beautiful memories stand out. In my undergraduate years, I had a best friend with whom I bicycled through quiet nights, parking our bikes by a bench overlooking the highway as cars passed below and the moon shone in the distance. We would sit there for hours, pondering grand questions together—about death, black holes, the origin of the universe, the nature of time, and even about love. Years later, I had another brief but luminous experience at a conference in Graz, Austria, surrounded by philosophers of science, where ideas, music, food, and conversation all blended into something that felt like true community. But the former experience lasted two years, and the latter only two days.

In the grand scheme of my past, there has been no lasting circle around me, no consistent environment of thinkers exploring big questions together. Only silence.

Perhaps this sense of solitude was a curse particular to Albany rather than a reflection of academia as a whole. But then again, I may be wrong.

What I do know is that physics, as it exists today, no longer feels like the unified community it once was. The great schools of the early twentieth century—Copenhagen, Göttingen, Cambridge—have faded into history. What remains now often feels fragmented into narrow, dogmatic subfields, many of them focused on speculative projects without a shared philosophical foundation. I respect physics deeply, yet the sense of belonging I once imagined I would find within it never materialized.

It took me many years to realize that community is not an optional accessory to a meaningful life. It is part of what makes thinking sustainable, joyful, and human. At seventeen, I could not see this. At twenty-nine, after learning to think but also experiencing disappointment, isolation, and disillusionment in the social realities of academia, I finally began to understand community as a central need rather than a luxury.

This realization has left me feeling untethered at times. When I look around at people my age, I often see two broad categories: those who have settled into jobs and family life with minimal community beyond necessity, and those who are deeply embedded in artistic or intellectual circles—musicians with bands, philosophers with seminar groups, filmmakers with crews. Meanwhile, I stand somewhere in between: I possess knowledge and the capacity to think, but I belong to no living, breathing community of practice.

There has been much noise lately in headlines claiming that “physics is dead.” But physics does not die when it fails to make new discoveries, as those headlines seem to suggest. Physics dies only when it loses a shared sense of what it means to do physics at all—when it loses a unified purpose, a shared emotional orientation, and a living community grounded in that purpose. If physics is “dead,” it is in this deeper sense, not in the sense of scientific progress slowing down.

I do not expect a tenure-track job later, and I do not care about prestige. My primary purpose in engaging with science is simply the joy and meaning it brings. Since physics offers the joy but not the community, I am compelled to attempt a kind of patchwork—to seek community elsewhere and engage with science purely for the fun of it, more like Faraday or Heaviside. Of course, this means I must be a serious contributor to that living community outside of physics, not merely someone who warms himself at its social fire.

So now, at this juncture, the real question I face is no longer “Which subject am I interested in?” but rather: Where can I build a community? Where can I be part of something meaningful, where the ideas I care about are welcomed, and where I can contribute something of value?

This question is broad and open-ended, especially given my wide range of interests. In an ideal world, I can imagine myself joining many different kinds of communities. I could pick up a guitar and find a home in music. I could study acting and enter the world of theatre. I could join an activist circle and become an advocate for a cause. I could devote myself to fiction and literature. I could even imagine becoming a farmer and finding community in a life close to the land. I believe in human potential—my own included—and I feel, in some sense, unconstrained by the specific form my future community might take.

But life is short. Time is limited. And I must begin with what I already possess: physics, philosophy, and an interest in moral and analytical reasoning. These are real skills—real parts of who I am—and they offer a starting point, even if the possibilities beyond them remain open.

My parents do not fully understand this inner landscape—neither my emotional experience nor my intellectual evolution. To them, the conflicts I have had with advisors and senior researchers appear simply as “broken relationships.” From their perspective, I look like someone who “failed in physics,” who “made bad choices,” who “wasted time,” and who should now accept a job and marry a recommended girl. I understand that their advice comes from concern, but it does not recognize where I am coming from or what I am seeking.

The truth is simple:
I have always had the itch to create something—to think freely, to live freely, to ask big questions.
And I want a community of others who value the same. I want a community as much as I want intellectual freedom.