Addiction and life
I have recently finished watching Breaking Bad for the first time and A Beautiful Mind for the first time in about 20 years.
To summarize these 2 shows would be with one word; addiction.
You see, while these shows are very different, although their main characters are into some form of mathematical equation, they also have the similarity that they are addicted. Not to a tangible thing per se, but to be useful to someone other than themselves.
Walter White wants to be useful to his family knowing very well that his time is running out, and he wants to leave something behind due to how flawed the American system is, therefore he is sort of living the American dream at a later age.
John Nash, on the other hand, wants to discover something in mathematics and be useful to the world. He doesn’t want to be useful to himself, or to people around him, but to the whole world.
For Walter, living a boring, dead-end job and side job is hard, passionless, and hard to conceive for a man of his brilliance.
For John, the mere thought of living and doing something other than mathematics and the pursuit of brilliance is driving him crazy.
To put it in other words, these are people who are not normal, but are forced to be, and they can’t cope with that.
While one story is real and one is not, one can’t help but wonder how many people like them are out there, struggling, dying day by day, because they haven’t been in the right place at the right time to find the trap door that flourishes their interests.
One can only wonder, what am I doing wrong?
Or one could be a normal person and never have these thoughts.
