Sometime back, a colleague and I had a conversation on retaining objectivity during decision making. I felt that if one does not do that in life generally, it won’t happen at work either. We live in our narratives, and the brain, after all, is only so flexible.
That led to a train of thought. Objectivity (also) comes from being able to step out and get a view of one’s self from outside. Insights into one’s self can happen all the while, if you allow it. Two recent incidents to highlight this.
*****
I love the window-seat-at-night experience, and miss no chance offered. Thanks to our willingness-to-go-anywhere-for-a-dining-experience habit, we sometimes end up seeing a Bangalore different from the cosmopolitan bubble. An example is parts of Varathur Road, whose shops, people etc are still more characteristic of a small town. On Saturday nights, when we return from say, Koramangala, that is the route our cab takes. I see people out and about there – some faces tense, some relieved at a day ending, some happy with a simple pleasure, say buying bangles from a roadside vendor.
I juxtaposed it against the night out we had just had at a new microbrewery, and paused at “simple pleasure”. I was feeling bad on their behalf because they might never get to experience what I did. But then I did a mental flashback to a decade and a half ago – to that small Chinese restaurant in Koramanagala that we used to frequent. To anyone seeing us through a car window, it would be a simple pleasure. But not for us. For us, it was happiness, and at that point, we wouldn’t trade it for anything. There we were then, and here we are now, with different standards of happiness. And to someone with more money than us, our current night out would be a “simple pleasure”. It’s all subjective and relative, and I laughed at myself for the silly bit of condescension. How objective am I when considering my own happiness, let alone someone else’s?
*****
We recently watched what had seemed a very “low key” show on Amazon Prime but actually turned out to be one we really liked – Forever. It is about a couple who have been married for a while. They’re comfortable with each other, enjoy the same things, have their rituals, and even take the same holiday every year! Many of the places and events in the show seemed like great metaphors for me – on objectivity and self actualisation.
(without spoilers) The husband loves routine, the wife would like some change. She blames him for holding her back. But later, she realizes that it’s not really true. I don’t know if I was watching the show with my own framing lens, but here goes – as we proceed in life, we (unconsciously) start limiting our own choices. We get comfortable. The possibilities are there, we are just scared of the trade offs. But we want the results of those possibilities, so in our own narrative, we blame externalities. Helps the self image. It’s part of our toolkit – the narratives are optimized for what helps survival, and that’s not necessarily the truth. My experiences tell me that the more objective one is, and the more acknowledging one is of one’s own responsibility in the trade off, the happier one can be.
*****
In my can-want-need framework, I think pandering to the ‘can’ gives me pleasure, satisfying the ‘want’ provides happiness, and understanding a ‘need’ and delivering it to myself, joy. Ironically, it is my bouts of objectivity that give me the insights on self that in turn will help me (I think) figure out my joys.