I think this is how happiness feels like.
It is 28th of July, 2026.
I am sitting in the library listening to Nils Frahm's "Let my key be C" which I call it the song of Skurmle.
Skurmle (:/ˈskɜːr.məl/) is the word Claude invented in the middle of our conversation about pattern recognition where I was having hard time believing lay is a past tense verb. She was trying to prove a point by saying that my brain's pattern recognition works. And our brain is recognizing patterns among a huge number of possibilities.
The number of possible letter combinations of the 26 letters of English at a 10 letters cap, is around 146 trillion possible strings. The Oxford English Dictionary has about 270,000 entries. If you include technical jargon, scientific terms, and slang, estimates push toward a million. Let's be generous and say 500,000.
So we basically use the tiniest amount of possibilities. For Persian and German it is even smaller:
Persian has 32 letters. So with the same 10-letter cap: 32¹ + 32² + … + 32¹⁰ ≈ 1.16 quadrillion possible strings. Already almost 8 times more than English just from 6 extra letters.
German has 30 letters (26 + ä, ö, ü, ß). Same calculation gives roughly 611 trillion possible strings. Sits right between English and Persian.
Skurmle, is the word that captures this vastness. It means to use only a fraction of all possibilities.
I am sitting in the library and things are not perfect but I don't feel stuck, forced or suspended. I can move toward something and I can build toward something. I am not on a run. I am sitted and I am moving, at my own pace. Is this what happiness is? being in the place with people with the same interests, more or less, having something to do that I enjoy and am good at.
There is this paper "
Difining Division of Labor in Microbial Communities" in from of me. I will be reading it for this week's Journal Club. I will go there and discuss a paper we read, with real curious and smart people. I read the Abstract and I get it. I have thought about this topic before. It makes sense. How is that I've never experienced this?
I feel I am in the right place.
Is this what happiness feels like?
Hey, my worried past self, whatever you did and every time that you stood up, got me here. And my future self, I will use all my accumulated experience and knowledge to hand it to you to utilize, in a meaningful fulfilling way.
Sincerely,
Zahra