Category: Life Ordinary

  • Thrifty shades of grey

    We’re nearing the day since the last time I stared at mortality – 3 years ago. And almost 5 years since I faced my own. To be honest, while I was going through it, I really didn’t think of it that way. From advising D on picking cabs from a certain direction (because of roadwork) to calming down the cab driver when he realised what was happening, to ‘checking in’ on Foursquare before the procedure, I still felt it wasn’t time. I think only idiocy or youth makes one capable of that, and given my age, it was clearly the former.

    Cut to today. As if the daily exercise regimen wasn’t reminder enough, the quarterly medical checks drive home the point of how much extra work one needs to do to live even a semblance of life as one wants it. It’s not much really – a little bit of red meat, a little bit of alcohol, dessert once in a while. It shouldn’t be this difficult before hitting 50!

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  • Rose-tinted wearables

    (a version of something I wrote on LinkedIn)

    Now that I think of it, there are at least four ‘spiritual predecessors’ for this post on the blog. It began with ‘In a world of abstractions‘ (2017), followed by Peak Abstraction (2018), The Presentation of Selfie in Everyday Life (2020), and A Proxy Life (2022). Each of them are continuing explorations of how we have abstracted a bunch of real things, and created proxies by which we measure them.

    Going by the story so far, it’d be fair to say that the more things we consume, the less time we have to get into details, and the more we rely on proxies. And across time, our consumption has only increased. And so our proxies have also multiplied.

    Material accumulations as a proxy for wealth

    Stock price/funding for a company’s health

    Popularity for excellence

    Price for quality

    Fitness for health

    Books Read (including that 5 min YouTube video) for intellect

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  • Choice Cess

    Past

    I read something beautiful on a LinkedIn post sometime back. Yes, miracles do happen.

    उन्हें कामयाबी में सुकून नजर आया तो वो दौड़ते गए,

    हमें सुकून में कामयाबी दिखी तो हम ठहर गए !

    Not that I had scaled some Himalayan peak of success, but the first line fits my 30s, and the second, my 40s. The underlying mindsets are different, and so are the journeys that give me joy. But it took the larger life journey and the choices of my past self to get here.

    You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.

    Rene Daumal, Mount Analogue (via James Clear)

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  • Truly Free

    I first read Kavi’s post on tattoos, which started with how he turned down even a temporary one. I could relate to that, and the post made me wonder what was my discomfort with getting a tattoo.

    My immediate thought was optionality. But thanks to some excellent coincidence, right below that post (in my feed) was one by The Marginalian which gave me a different perspective.

    We build our lives around structures of certainty — houses to live in, marriages to love in, ideologies to think in — and yet some primal part of us knows that none abides, knows that we pay for these comforting illusions with our very aliveness.

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  • Three shades of freedom

    At large

    It is freedom weekend in this part of the world. We make an impromptu lunch plan, and use the metro. Then go to a mall for bubble tea, our new comfort drink. There is something metaphorical about that – our bubble inside a messy reality. I noticed that at the restaurant, on the roads, in the mall, there weren’t a lot of smiling people. I reflect that maybe it’s a sign of the times. After all, if you go by social media, everyone else is doing better.

    And it isn’t just online, it’s a reality too.I think specifically about the service staff in the restaurant, security guards at the metro station. They are working on a day when everyone else has the day off. Waking up early, going back late. They are living lives of precarity, something I read in Eula Biss’ Having and Being Had.

    “…depending on the will or pleasure of another was the original meaning of precarious, and that it comes from the Latin for prayer. Precarity is everywhere, it seems. Maybe it is, as Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing writes, the condition of our time. It is also the defining feature of an entire class of people, the precariat. 

    Illness or disability can force somebody into the precariat as can divorce, war, or natural disaster. The precariat is composed of migrant workers and temp workers and contract workers, and part-time workers. People who work unstable jobs that offer “no sense of career.” There are few opportunities to advance in these jobs, and no way to bargain for better terms.

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