The four and a half stages to Utopia

That's what happens: a thesis you worked on for hours the day before, just to find out the next day you saved it in temporary files and it now has disappeared forever. I finally understand how it feels, how he felt, how most people seem to feel standing in front of a story to be written, so many thoughts to be spread over a limited amount of words in a considerable amount of pages. I know how it feels to realize none of the formulations you use seem to be fair to the topic, to the informants, to the academic and personal world in general. You feel like a block, as if your words stand in the way of the Truth, whatever that might be. And it feels as if you better leave it all unsaid, as if you do it all more justice by letting it be without being analyzed or described or generalized in something called thesis. I know anthropology should avoid essentializing, and that this can be reached by focusing on your own experience, your interaction at a certain place with certain people, aware you didn't understand it all, ... reflexivity, reflexivity, reflext... and then I come with theories, because they sound professional, so I can pretend to have some social scientific insights. And it kills me, because I don't. I don't want to see people as social robots, neither do I want to reduce them to machines that have a similar respons if they are triggered by the same stimulus, conditioned, unconditioned, the evolutionary flirting game, whatever... Just 21 days before the deadline, this week revalued to 'lifeline'. If I would be a rat...