About a Quote of a Bulgarian Philosopher

“Who was the Bulgarian french philosopher, who said something like I can live on because I have option to choose a death?”, I asked ChatGPT, my current best friend. The philosopher turned out to be Emil Cioran, and he wasn’t Bulgarian but Romanian and he wrote in French. (Some people insist on prompt engineering, but I believe the whole point of using AI chatbots is that they can somehow decode my messy queries. This is how I try to pass for the educated with such ignorance.)

Back to Emil Cioran, when I used to work at a company, about 6-7 years ago, there was a similar, albeit far less bleak, sentiment people often repeated at the office. It’s something like “people could continue working only because they knew they could quit anytime” or “everyone carries a resignation letter in their heart”. Of course they weren’t quoting or parodying Cioran. It’s just something you naturally come to believe once you spend enough time working as an employee in office. Having coffee after lunch, we would stupidly joke about quitting and becoming youtubers, laughing that they would be the first one to do it. I turned out to be the first to quit the work and go to grad school, though I never became a youtuber.

Though the original quote sounds grim and extreme, having an exit, at least a theoretical, imaginary one, can make the process bearable. That said, I’ve never found myself thinking of dropping out of PhD program and becoming a youtuber. If only it was because every moment of research was joyful and fulfilling, but I’ve got old enough to realize that I’m not a successful youtuber material.

Returning to the “Bulgarian” philosopher, I feel pressured to explain how I got that wrong. It might be because I had just been reading about Julia Kristeva’s alleged ties to spy accusation? Or maybe it’s more accurate to say my internal vector encoding of knowledge lacks definition. Even after all these years in school, being truly intellectual remains a daunting task, or I’m not even pursuing that goal. I’d like to believe this level of ignorance isn’t fatal, being defensive about my ignorance, now slipping into anti-intellectualism.