Issue 1
Here we are: two days stand between me and that scary new decade which means saying goodbye once and for all to my dear twenties… I don’t think I'm ready for that.
The number 30 scares me, probably due to all the pressure of others’ expectations. The common mindset is that if you are turning 30, you should have already achieved (or at least be about to) a few key milestones:
👰🏻♀️ Marriage! (or, as a minimum, living with a partner.) ❌
💍 Engagement! ❌
🤰🏻 Child! Pregnancy! Or be very close to one of those...❌
💼 Found your dream career path! ❌
🏠Live somewhere you will stay for a while! ❌(Bonus: you bought a home there! ❌)
Look at this list. I am almost 30 and I haven’t achieved ANY of these milestones. How could I possibly not be anxious looking at this? Mara: bad, bad, bad performance review.
I keep getting calls from girlfriends telling me that they are either about to get married or that they are pregnant. The conversation then, following polite and politically correct social custom, moves toward me and my life and I am asked the terrible question: what about you? And here is the beginning of the end, and it goes a little something like this…
“Are you dating someone?”
Well, you know, over a pandemic, with lockdowns, is almost impossible to….
“Do you hang out with friends?”
Well, again, with covid many left London so, I should get to know new people and hope that life will be back to normal very soon…
“Do you think you will keep living in London for the next few years?’
Well, I don’t know, I have many projects… New York is still in my mind...
“How’s work? We all see you are making a wonderful career!”
Well. Well. Well.
And the job discussion usually ends the conversation.
No pressure, right? And to make matters worse, usually, after one of my girlfriends has made a big announcement, on a baby coming or a wedding that is about to be celebrated, my mom calls me—because she has just spoken to my friends’ moms—and she goes in:
“All are becoming grandmothers but me. All are having their grandkids but me and your dad, what a shame… But look, I don’t care, I know you are different, the thing that I care about the most is that you are happy. But...”
Because with moms there is always a BUT.
“If I had you here in Italy again, and if I knew you were living with a boyfriend, that would make me more comfortable and happy…”
Meanwhile, the only thing I can think of at this moment is where I will spend the day of my 30 birthday. I've already decided that I’ll be dancing on a beach—possibly in Mykonos—drinking Moët & Chandon—rigorously rose! all day long. But I guess I’m a weirdo, considering what should be a normal path for a normal girl entering her ‘30. But hey, I can’t be the only one in this situation, right?
I started thinking of everything I’ve done in my 20s to reach this point. I’ve been writing a journal for 20 years but re-reading those pages did not provide me with answers to my questions. I thought there must be something I was missing, something I could not see… And then the eureka moment: I work in the realm of AI, so why not to use AI to find the hidden patterns in my past to show me the overlooked insights from my younger self that (my thirty-year-old eyes) can’t see?
Engaged with this new mission, I collected the data from 10 years of Facebook posts, WhatsApp conversations, Instagrams, tweets, and whatever other social that I used in my 20s. My aim is to use AI as a human tool helping me better understand my younger self by finding hidden connections and patterns in the words I used, in the pictures I posted, in the vocal messages I recorded… I wanted everything that could feed an algorithm and help me to better understand my past self to predict what will come next.
AI can help us better explore ourselves and turn our historical data into something completely unexpected. AI can give a new value to our digital existence. I used some NLP algorithms written by me, an LDA model, and the power of Watson AI Services (Yes, I am an IBMer so, why not? Hope that the blessed soul of T.J. Watson will forgive this act of using Watson products -- usually for serious use cases, such as business, data science, and AI platforms-- for doing my crazy exercise!)
Now that I’ve started this project, I want to share with you what I find out about the Mara from my twenties. In every issue of this newsletter, I’ll share part of the AI findings on me. There's a lot of vulnerability here folks; by sharing my personal data and transforming it into stories, I’ll be completely naked to your eyes (metaphorically!) so, please, treat this newsletter with care.
It will be a long journey. I already know we can find good insights in the past, but I do not know what will happen next: when it comes to predicting the future of human existence, AI is not yet ready. Anyways, I hope you will stick with me along this journey.
Yours truly,
Mara