Change Signalling

The end of the year signals a time to reflect. The perfect opportunity presented itself recently, when a colleague was bidding adieu after 5 years. There seemed to be no better venue than Monkey Bar, which was itself in the last week of its operations. Our group was mixed – early and mid thirties to early forties – and we talked about life in Bangalore, kids or not, and where we planned to settle after work. When I said that I was considering Cochin, at least a couple of my colleagues wondered if I would be able to adapt. I explained that the biggest joys in my life, in addition to reading and travel, were Malayalam movies and porotta-beef, that I wear the mundu a lot at home, and nostalgia or not, my mind often wanders the roads of my hometown.

But yes, this is a change from my stance even a year back – the possibility of a return, that is. And it happened largely because of a stray news article that picked Kochi as a good place to retire. My first thought was – what about the annual floods, you idiot? But it did make me start a research, and conclude that three of my biggest concerns – heat, a not-so-related-to-heat dry state, and floods, all had solutions. And in a 10 year horizon, this could work.

And predictably, it led to a deeper thought – why had I settled on Bangalore? Yes, there was our home, and the creature comforts around we were used to. There were friends. There was inertia obviously – changing cities in one’s 50s is well, an unsettling thought! But I was sure this was just the surface – my travel insight had made me more cautious.

In The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt cites psychologist Dan McAdams in suggesting that our personality has three levels. The first is the basic traits (typically measured by the big five – neuroticism, extroversion, openness to new experiences, agreeableness and conscientiousness), the second is “characteristic adaptations” (personal goals, dense/coping mechanisms, values and beliefs, and life-stage concerns), and the final one – the “life story”. An “evolving story that integrates a reconstructed past, perceived present and anticipated future into a coherent and vitalising life myth.” The stories we tell the world, and ourselves. The signalling follows.

A decade and a half of living in Bangalore had shaped a persona and self image, and from that a story had emerged. That story was now driving the narrative, mandating its own signals in terms of consumption and lifestyle in general, and veering away from my basic traits. And that’s why, whenever I pause to reflect these days, the desire is actually to dial down. The good news is that it is possible. In How Emotions Are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett explains how by creating/changing our mental constructs (“concepts”), we can change our emotions. Even  just knowing words that don’t have an appropriate English translation can help us frame our emotions better. For instance, in the Cochin context, objectively speaking, the world could be the Welsh hiraeth.

I think these self-revelations are at least partly the result of reaching a life stage. Mid-life! And in many of my behaviours, I realise I am now counter-signalling (the “signalling” article linked earlier explains what that is). But I also speculated whether it is not just me, but the world at large that was seeing a change in signalling.

The job of signals were to make sense of noise. From education degrees to homes to social media following, we have been using signals – judging and being judged. But increasingly, signals are losing their credibility. There is almost always a hack possible to create signals out of nothing, with negligible, if any, costs (in small timeframes). That does explain a whole many things happening around us –  unicorns turning to dust, billionaires and stars seeing their reputation fall, and individuals buckling under the pressure of their signals, all in increasingly smaller timespans.