Category: Flawsophy

  • Unidentity-fying

    A theme has been emerging, even more stronger since I wrote “Living a life of Intentionality“. Pithily summarised as “At this age, I prefer an identity that provides the least friction and regrets in the life I want to lead.” How do I get there? A key factor I identified for myself is acknowledging the difference between my wants and likes, and deeply questioning my wants. Where does that get me? From that post, Intentionality helps you have your needs and considered likes as anchors. When that happens, a whole lot of clarity emerges – what you spend time and money on, people whom you will go overboard for, how you plan your days, weeks and months, and what can get you out of those lil twinges of envy and seemingly deep pools of a mid-life crisis.

    But while I was trying to get there, I encountered a strong opponent – myself, or rather, my identity. I first brought it up in Marshmellowing. The key point in the first was how in my approach to getting what I needed/wanted, my larger desire for ‘freedom’ led me to optimising for optionality – a huge bias for scenario planning. I think the identity I created thanks to this is aptly called the Marshmallow mind (by Frederik Gieschen), and its best expression is a poem I read in Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger, attributed to A.E. Housman

    The thoughts of others

    Were light and fleeting,

    Of lovers’ meeting

    Or luck or fame.

    Mine were of trouble,

    And mine were steady;

    So I was ready

    When trouble came.

    In Marshmellowing – The Prequel, I wrote about my path to this identity/self image from childhood. A great description of it appears in Robert M. Sapolsky’s Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. In the personality section, Sapolsky practically described my (former) Type A personality down to a behavioural “time-pressuredness” (research by Meyer Friedman and colleagues), default hostility, and a persistent sense of insecurity, the last being a predictor of cardiovascular problems. Add to it disciplined, discomfort with ambiguity, and (formerly) repressive in terms of emotional expression, and you have my profile! Damn!

    My self image, and increasingly my identity was the kind of person who thought in a certain way and behaved in a certain way. While its origins was my ‘responsible child’ identity that possibly repressed my freedom of emotional expression in favour of (parental) attachment, in adulthood, it transformed into a “responsible adult” self image that ironically optimised for freedom and optionality, and underplayed the need for attachment. It became an identity, and many of my decisions were biased in that direction.

    It is only in the very recent past – through reading and reflection, that I have begun to be at least a little fine with unplanned-ness. As I wrote on LinkedIn, the universe’s tendency is randomness! An excellent read in a different context was The Tao of Physics. I realised that In both quantum field theory and eastern philosophies, physical phenomena (including us) are mere transient occurrences in an underlying entity. How humbling that is!

    I think I have made progress by moving from fixed goals through fixed strategies to fixed goals through flexible strategies. I hope, after we are confident of financial freedom, that I can move to flexible goals and flexible strategies. Meanwhile, the biggest task in all this is the mindset. Mindset made the identity, and now it has to dismantle it. Erich Fromm wrote this a long time ago – “Life, in its mental and spiritual aspects, is by necessity insecure and uncertain…The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself, is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity without panic and undue fear“. Decades later, we have a pithier version.

  • Marshmellowing – The Prequel

    In Marshmellowing, I wrote about how a life spent optimising for predictability (or at least optionality) is probably what is keeping me from the life I want to live. And the person I want to be.

    At a proximal level, I understand why I am the way I am. The marshmallow mind (delayed gratification) is not only a muscle that automatically plans for the future, but is also the custodian of a self image it created. But I am still figuring out why it came to be that way. What is that self image in this context? And how did it get created?

    A bunch of my reading, listening, and reflecting in the last couple of years has been to understand why I am the way I am – at macro and individual levels. At the macro level, I have been able to synthesise a bit, this post is an attempt to track the evolution of my self image.

    In one of my favourite podcasts – Dr. Gabor Maté on the Tim Ferriss Show, the former mentions how outside of physical needs, the two other critical needs humans have is attachment and authenticity. We need attachment because without the care of parents or vice versa we would die. Back in the savannah, we had to go by gut feel because there was no social learning mechanism. We therefore needed authenticity – connection to the self. He then shares a fantastic insight on how our authenticity gets suppressed right from childhood, with a great example.

    When I look back, I can see at least four elements that make up my current self. As a marketer, I have to alliterate. So here goes.

    Responsibility

    I don’t remember that far back, but my 10 year old self has a version of what Dr. Maté was referring to. Some of my earliest memories are about studying hard. If I did that, mom wouldn’t be angry and I would be spared a beating. She was driven by the fact that she didn’t have much time (she was diagnosed with leukaemia around the time I turned 10). At school too, being a good student meant the admiration of peers and the affection of teachers. I gradually built a self image of a responsible person. From an authenticity perspective, I was probably more creatively inclined, and terribly shy. But between my academics, music and things like quizzing, I was thrust into some level of limelight at my first school.

    Rebellion

    Somewhere in my teens, and it is no coincidence that it was around the time of mom’s passing, I developed quite a sense of humour. Maybe it began as a coping mechanism, but soon after, its underlying theme was a rebellion against any perceived injustice and authority. I think that is my authentic self, and it drew people to me. It does now too. Everyone likes someone who takes a stance and in the process, make them laugh. But back then, it wasn’t enough to dislodge the lesson that being responsible was what helped attachment. I need to be grateful that my authentic creative self found outlets and kept itself alive.

    Relationships

    While I was in engineering college, my grandmother, who was probably the most influential person in my life and someone I deeply loved, left our home to live with my uncle. A few years later, after engineering, I ended up having to figure out my own higher education because there was no one who gave me perspective. Maybe I could have asked. But these experiences led me to a mindset that relationships as a means to attachment was a dead-end. This got accentuated when D and I arranged our own marriage. When I look back, my dad and D’s parents were gracious in their acceptance. But a mindset had been created. Attachment would come with success, and that would come from taking responsibility of my own life. It is ironic that the responsibleness that was originally meant for attachment then moved me away from people.

    Relevance

    Relevance as a means to advance the career, and make some money. I am thankful that another facet of my authentic self – curiosity (reading, figuring out)- played its part, though not by active design. Between this, my sense of responsibility (at work), and the sense of humour that is sometimes weaponised as sarcasm, I got myself a sufficiently differentiated personality to reasonably succeed in my career. Relevance continues to be a way of making sure I am employed in some form and my FU Money target is met sooner than later.

    And that sums me up, or at least the self image. Now, we are a year or two from our FU Money, and I can still crack a joke. What is the problem?

    There are three, actually. My marshmallow mind is the result of ‘responsibility’ winning. It comes with costs. The marshmallow mind continues to plan the future and make predictions. In this other phenomenally good podcast on Hidden Brain, Lisa Feldman Barrett talks about how the brain can get trapped in its own predictions. When the predictions don’t work out, the result is stress.

    As she elaborates, it operates at a different level too. The brain is an energy budgeting machine optimised for survival and reproduction. Apparently, the suppression of authentic emotions can potentially result in chronic stress, contributing to a bankrupt body budget. Over time, this could predispose individuals to depression, as the brain repeatedly predicts and conserves energy to cope with unresolved internal conflicts. Feldman Barrett describes depression as a state where the brain, faced with chronic energy deficits, prioritises conserving resources. This manifests as fatigue, lack of motivation, and inability to update predictions or engage with the environment. Exactly what I want to avoid.

    And finally, it doesn’t help when predictability becomes the objective in all situations across life. It perpetuates a stress response even in non-threatening situations. Relationships are frowned upon by my predictive mind because humans increase complexity and reduce the accuracy of predictions. The loss of relationships is also a suppression of authenticity, because relationships are the biggest component of who I want to be.

    And that’s why all my efforts now are to regulate my marshmallow mind!

  • Marshmellowing

    “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” That played out well in this context. I remember seeing this (image below) in a Farnam Street newsletter a while back and it validated something I had been doing for a while. In any situation, can I place myself such that circumstance/environment doesn’t cause a decision I’ll regret? Because, to quote from Ozark, “People make choices. Choices have consequences.”

    Optionality

    Optimising for this is the reason behind almost everything I had built as a muscle – planning, granular detailing, specific scenario planning, constantly aiming for predictability (or at least optionality), the people I let in and how much, and deliberation on what I do. And that mindset, I told D recently, is probably coming in the way of the life I want to lead.

    A little more of context setting before we address that. This is where the master appears – in the form of this post. If we go by the image below (from the post), I am successful and on that line dividing miserable and happy. Just to clarify, there is no ‘reaching the top’ in my case. I define (my) success as being able to say ‘I have enough’ on wealth, health and relationships, and can still retain my curiosity.

    Successful-Happy

    At this point, I have the Marshmallow mind (context), and the post accurately describes my conundrum.

    So you do the work. You sacrifice. And because you’re sacrificing while others are out having fun, success becomes more and more important to your identity. You slowly forge the chains that can keep you up there, in that top left quadrant, in which you thought only other people could get stuck. But that pivot to living a fulfilled life doesn’t happen. Marshmallow Mind has become too powerful. And Marshmallow Mind lives in the future...Marshmallow Mind tricks us into believing that the rewards for delayed gratification compound forever. They don’t. Eventually, they turn into a trap whose escape requires a radical break with our old identity. As Buffett put it, “the chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”

    The Marshmallow mindset affects the way I react to things, because the muscles are a habit now. And layered on that is a self image. It’s time for some mellowing. As Tim Ferriss says in this phenomenally good conversation with Gabor Mate, sometimes, you need life to save you from what you want to give you what you need. I think life has done its bit in terms of multiple kinds of losses, gains, and lessons.

    But the challenge is that my system will resist the learning! More about that in another post, citing another fantastic podcast. For now, the plan is something that I heard in that podcast, where the guest’s daughter’s karate teacher says, “Get your butterflies in flying formation”, because what I seek is “the rapture of being alive“.

    P.S. Seems I caught this a couple of years ago, I now need to take some concrete actions 🙂

  • Schooled for life

    One of the things I spend a lot of time reflecting on is my own OS or wiring, and its updates. In a recent conversation with D, courtesy a college reunion (25 years!) I realised that I have very, very few friends from school and college whom I stay in touch with. Why was that, I wondered.

    I don’t have many memories of my first school – Std 1 and 2. I remember the uniform vividly, and the prizes I won. I have forgotten what they were for though. I have a flood of memories about my second school – Std 3 to 7. Probably because I think they were my best days. I was almost always ranked first in class, I sang, recited poetry, was part of the quiz team, and even played hockey! What I remember most was how accommodating the teachers were when I had to miss classes for practice and competitions. Many of them actively encouraged me to pursue the things I showed some interest and talent in.

    And it went beyond that. There was something in the people I knew then. I remember how once, there was some competition in a different school, and G, my classmate and biggest competitor for the first rank in class, hadn’t advanced to the final round and yet stayed back so she could drop me at home. I shifted schools after 7th because we were moving to a different part of town. Immediately after my exams, I also had a minor surgery. R, my Hindi teacher, visited me in the hospital with her husband. What I remember most, thus, is the kindness.

    I have to admit that I don’t think I repaid it much. After I had shifted schools, I participated in some competition, now representing my new school. My old teachers were there too, and being the uber shy idiot I am, I didn’t even acknowledge them. How bad they must have felt!

    I didn’t like my new school at all. Somehow I just didn’t fit in. They prioritised academics at the cost of everything else, and there was very little space for the other things I enjoyed. While I made a few friends, the camaraderie I had in my other school just wasn’t there. On hindsight, maybe mom’s illness was also playing on my mind.

    I think it also had to do with the kind of neighbourhoods I lived in. Before we shifted, we lived in a university campus. Largely egalitarian – people working in the same place, living in similar quarters, earning within the same range, enjoying the same facilities and so on. When we moved to the city, the house itself was one of the smallest in the street, though I don’t think I paid it that much attention. The inequalities in general were bigger, something that reflected in the kids at school too. The in-groups were stronger, and I feel it to this day in WhatsApp groups.

    It wasn’t that there weren’t kind people there – I remember how M consoled me for hours after mom passed away. I went to ridiculous movies with R,A and S. I had a good friend V, who had a terrible accident and was in pain for months. I used to visit him in the hospital and his relatives used to make me sing. Yes, facepalm. I used to guiltily look at V even as I sang. At reunions (which I mostly avoid) and in the WhatsApp group, I see a totally different person. Someone I cannot relate to at all. Maybe his wiring changed after that accident, and the mental and physical anguish it caused. The change in me after 10th was quite drastic. Mom’s death pretty much unleashed a wicked sense of humour, which was my armour until recently.

    I think, after her death, and later, when my grandmother moved to my uncle’s place during my engineering days, my subconscious probably decided that relationships had a shelf life. That friends were that, only in a certain context. When it came down to it, I was the only person I could depend on. It took D and most of my life to get over that.

    Then again, as the joke goes

    Jesus miracle friends

  • Rootless

    In Lessons in Chemistry, Lewis Pullman’s character is an orphan (in real life, his father is Bill Pullman, who in other lives was a fantastic American President in the mid 90s and in the 2020’s was a tortured, but great detective). But I digress.

    His character is quite an achiever, but I don’t think that’s how the average orphan’s life goes. There are a lot of famous people who were orphaned, but subsequently adopted. I’d think that the number not adopted would be higher though, and in any case, we rarely know about unexceptional lives. Many of us who lose even one parent early in life feel the loss consciously or subconsciously. And I am reasonably sure it shapes our character and worldview. At least I can speak for myself. Even for those whose loss comes later in life – after their own lives are reasonably well established, there is the sudden jolting realisation that an unquestioning, non-judging backup, even if it was never used, is now gone forever.

    And so I wonder, what does it mean to live a life when it starts with rejection? How does it feel when they become conscious of it the first time? Does it happen when one among them get adopted? Is there loneliness, or does their bond with the others help them avoid that? What about a sense of privacy? Do they even get that, do they even think of that when they rarely have space of their own? What about ownership? How does the concept work when everything is practically shared?

    When they grow up, how does all this affect the way they engage with the world? What about expectations – from others, their own of themselves, or fulfilling someone else’s? Do their relationships suffer from the baggage of rejection? Does their behaviour with others get affected because of their (non) notions about privacy and ownership? How complex must it be for them to accept and receive love?

    Sometimes I think being raised by parents or even one parent is one of those privileges – like having a well-functioning body with all appendages intact, all sense organs working fine – that we easily take for granted. After all, we only have to reflect on the routes we want to travel in the journey of life, and that in itself is not easy. Imagine being rootless, unable to resolve where one came from.