Category: Life Ordinary

  • The ordinary kindness of Mohandas

    My surname is very unobtrusive. It is present in all my official documents. It’s absent in my signature, and when I am casually giving my name in say, a form, I stop at my middle name, which exists courtesy Kerala’s matrilineal ethos. The surname’s modest behaviour is apt for the person it represents.

    (more…)

  • Planning for spontaneity

    Erich Fromm’s Fear of Freedom (1941) has been my favourite read this year. The book was largely meant as an explanation for the rise of Nazism, but by tracing historical patterns of man’s interaction with society, it ended providing some fantastic perspectives on the self. Specifically, man’s contradictory needs of wanting to conform and wanting to be free. As Fromm points out, across ages, we have attained a variety of ‘freedom from’ (nature’s whims, Church etc) but have also systematically discouraged the expression of emotions, our spontaneity.

    He lives in a world to which he has lost genuine relatedness and in which everybody and everything has been instrumentalised, where he has become a part of the machine he has built. He thinks, feels and wills what he us supposed to think, feel and will; in this very process he loses his self upon which all genuine security of a free individual must be built…

    By conforming with the expectations of others, by not being different, these doubts about one’s own identity are silenced and a certain security is gained. However the price paid is high. Giving up spontaneity and individuality results in a thwarting of life.

    Fromm explains how spontaneous activity is the means by which we can attain “freedom to”. This is positive freedom.

    Spontaneous activity is the one way in which man can overcome the terror of aloneness without sacrificing the integrity of his self; for in the spontaneous realisation of his self, man unites himself anew with the world – with man, nature and himself.

    The inability to act spontaneously, to express what one genuinely feels and thinks, and the resulting necessity to present a pseudo self to others and oneself, are the root of the feeling of inferiority and weakness.

    Somewhere in all this, I sensed the indirect presence of a favourite topic – the abundance mindset. Specifically, in the idea of spontaneity. In my immediate circle, I know three people who are quite spontaneous. Interestingly, they also share an abundance mindset. Yes, correlation, not causation. But maybe…

    Let me unpack the connections. One reason to not be spontaneous is conformism. But I have never really been a conformist. (I have recently figured out the probable reason, but that’s a different story.) However, there is a wrinkle, perhaps best explained by this:

    If loneliness is to be defined as a desire for intimacy, then included within that is the need to express oneself and to be heard, to share thoughts, experiences and feelings. Intimacy can’t exist if the participants aren’t willing to make themselves known, to be revealed. But gauging the levels is tricky. Either you don’t communicate enough and remain concealed from other people, or you risk rejection by exposing too much altogether: the minor and major hurts, the tedious obsessions, the abscesses and cataracts of need and shame and longing. My own decision had been to clam up, though sometimes I longed to grab someone’s arm and blurt the whole thing out, to pull an Ondine, to open everything for inspection.

    To refuse scrutiny is to dodge the possibility of rejection, though also the possibility of acceptance, the balm of love. 

    The Lonely City, Olivia Laing

    I’m still working out the paradox, but while I am nonconformist in most things, I also avoid getting judged. It doesn’t help that I am shy and introverted. My trade-off has been similar to Laing. Rather than conform, I clam up, as a shield against judgement. But it also means that I am forgoing chances of a genuine connection beyond a handful of close friends, and yes, this blog. Clamming up and spontaneity don’t mix well.

    “…to be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves.”

    ― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

    There’s another factor that works against my being spontaneous – a scarcity mindset. My reaction to it, instinctively to begin with, and by design later, was to create predictability by planning my life. Or, in the insightful way that Khaled Hosseini has framed it,

    But I had a plan for spontaneity. My thinking was that by making many things routine (clothes, diet, finances) etc, I can use choice avoidance to have the space and the mind space to be spontaneous. (read) But the extreme is a bad place to be, and in my case, I not only became a slave to routine, but also got upset if it didn’t happen in a certain way. As it goes, the neurons that wire together, fire together, and over a period of time, it also led me to seek efficiency in everything.The instrumentalisation of life, in Fromm’s words. Also, the crowding out of spontaneity.

    Before we get to possible solutions, a few reasons I need to solve this. At a human level, the combination of non-conformity and the slavery to routine and efficiency is practically a fool-proof way to push people away! Also, the uncertainty in things around us is only rising. Trying to have a plan that covers everything is just hubris. As a species, we will have to draw upon the innate strength that got us here – adaptability. And finally, there is philosophy

    People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

    Joseph Campbell

    So what’s a possible fix? In Atomic Habits, James Clear argues that we can behave in a certain way until we get to the mindset. Intuitively, and from experience, that seems relatively easier than theoretically changing a scarcity mindset. If one isn’t blessed enough to have an abundance mindset, maybe behaving like one does – spontaneity to begin with, will get one there. So, if spontaneity is the behaviour change, I have to go oxymoronic – force myself to be spontaneous! In other words, use my nonconformism to unlock the ‘freedom to’ be spontaneous. Hopefully, its positive results will temporarily override shyness, introversion and the desire for efficiency, and an abundance mindset might find a way in. The first baby step is to watch myself when killing spontaneity. I also have another clue. Money is a factor that has a disproportionate influence on my mind, and I have discovered that when something doesn’t make a dent there, I am more amenable to spontaneity, and joy.

    At a daily level, to quote from this fantastic read on happiness, “any neuroscience article will tell you that the “reward centre” of the brain – the nucleus accumbens – monitors actual reward minus predicted reward.” In my efficiency play, I will have predictable happiness, which will get normalised to practically zero happiness over time. I have found a couple of ways to engineer prediction error – one is not to plan the minutiae of travel, and the second is to spend more time with people who are spontaneous. Or as Venkatesh Rao puts it, ‘differently free people’, in this fantastic post. The good news is that I have three readily available ones and I am now ‘awake’ enough to spot others when I find them. Predictable unpredictability!

    Thus the idea is to go from choice avoidance based on efficiency to choice avoidance based on the freedom to be. As Venkat so brilliantly put it, “Detachment does not mean you don’t care what happens. It just means you don’t care whether a specific thing happens or not.” I have solved it in terms of conformity (freedom from) I now need to solve for spontaneity (freedom to). To live for an in-the-moment version of the want in Hosseini’s quote.

  • Picture abhi wonky hai

    I had a lot of fun using a business and brand framing to look at the Pan-India vs Bollywood debate. Thank you Guru for pushing me to do this.

    Trailer

    The world is fighting many existential crises – climate change, rising inequality, real and virtual viruses. That’s why it’s imperative that we discuss the one thing that offers us escape from all this. No, not the metaverse, but Bollywood. And its own existential crisis. I tried unsuccessfully to fob it off as Bollywood getting on the quiet quitting bandwagon but got unamused looks. So here goes – a simplistic take on it.

    More

  • Relative rationality

    After a failed exchange plan, I gave our TV to the apartment security guy. I had thought it would be an upgrade for him, but it turned out he had no TV at home, and therefore no clue what to do with it. I suggested talking to the cable guy in his neighbourhood, but the next day he gleefully announced that his daughter had connected it to the mobile and they were now watching YouTube. I told him about data charges but overall, the issue was resolved.

    Them

    Around the same time, D got a call from a relative in Kerala about her daughter joining a college in Bangalore. She wanted to know if we knew about the college, and also check how far we were from it. We were especially far away, and I wondered why they didn’t use Google Maps since all relevant locations were known to them. Later, it turned out that they even visited Bangalore to get the hostel sorted and apparently went right back because classes had not begun and any stay in the hostel would involve extra charges! This time I wondered why they didn’t use the phone to call ahead and ask the college before setting out! I found it especially surprising because the girl’s brother claimed to regularly shop from Amazon! I automatically compared these two kids to the security guy’s daughter, roughly the same age. Did staying in Bangalore provide a kind of ‘tech privilege’, or was it a mindset?

    Us

    We also have a few friends in their 40s who have settled abroad. A conversation about waiting times for doctors in Europe led to a quality of life comparison. We have now spent close to two decades in Bangalore, and never really made any attempts to settle elsewhere. I remember how in my 20s, my mindset was that we’d be second class citizens anywhere else in the world. I also didn’t want to move far away from Kerala, though this was at a time when culture – food, movies etc – wasn’t as portable as it is today. Traffic notwithstanding, I really like Bangalore and wouldn’t trade places, but the 40s are when you face your “what ifs” head on, and ideally get some closure! But I digress.

    The discussion made me wonder how an objective observer would evaluate our decision to not move abroad. I think we could have easily done it in our 30s if we had decided to, especially given we had no procreation plans. And yet we didn’t really consider it or even have a serious discussion about it. Arguably, the quality of life in at least some parts of the West is better, and so, would that observer think of it as an opportunity wasted? And think of us the same way I thought of D’s relatives – not using the access they had to ‘unlock’ information and opportunities?

    Everyone

    The concept, of course, is bounded rationality – the idea that rationality is limited when individuals make decisions, and under these limitations, rational individuals will select a decision that is satisfactory rather than optimal. Satisficing vs optimising. But what I am realising now are a couple of things. One, it is practically impossible to be objective about it. I continued to rationalise even as I wrote about our domicile non-decision! And it’s not just for the self after time has passed – it’s a moving target because one evolves. Not stepping into the same river twice and all that. It is also for others about whom one can be relatively more objective. Funny how I expect them to optimise when I don’t always do it in my personal life. Yet another reason to stay from being judgmental about others, and self! And two, the increasing levels of satisficing that happens as one grows older. Interestingly, I automatically compartmentalise work and life and am an optimiser in the former. But in personal contexts, it’s a struggle because there are two opposing mindsets – “growth happens at the end of your comfort zone” vs “you do you”. And I can’t even say do what you’re comfortable with because that’s clearly in the comfort zone. Maybe a better framing is “what makes me feel alive”.

  • Habit much!

    Nearly five years ago, when I wrote about the closure of my second (and probably final, given the zero usage now) book of accounts, I had ended it with how the days of our lives have found a rhythm, a familiarity. They actually point to the habits that have become a part of my life. Earlier this year, when I wrote The building blocks of freedom, the ending was again a commentary on habits. As I quoted in it (from a splendid post Routine Maintenance), while habits are indeed a way to off-load cognitive overhead… at their most extreme, habits can slide into addictions and compulsions, patterns that resist our conscious efforts to break them… Ritual dissolved into routine.

    Habits, as I wrote, are possibly a micro-version of intentionality. They are are physical, mental and even emotional. But when we don’t review them, it is almost as though they hijack our intentions and make them subservient! It’s almost like the new Batman’s point about scars – Our scars can destroy us, even after the physical wounds have healed. But if we survive them, they can transform us. They can give us the power to endure, and the strength to fight. As I have realised many times recently, it is extremely difficult to be objective about my habits. It is only when I am deeply mindful that I observe some of my habits, and sometimes laugh at their absurdity. But when I go back and understand where it came from, I also give a mental hug to my earlier self. 🙂

    Very recently, it also made me review my deep-set approach to retirement. I had mentioned that in my previous post – the third point in Uma Shashikant’s excellent article (below).

    I always assumed that the day I stopped working for a living, I could switch into a ‘different me’. I now see how it’s quite impossible. I will have to start looking at the ‘difference’ right now, and build new habits and junk old ones that can help me move in the direction of the ‘new’ me. The idea is that it won’t seem new. Turns out this isn’t a problem that only I encountered. In a couple of books and articles that I read recently, I came across some very insightful perspectives.

    Familiarity and habit impoverishes the way they look at things. They are mostly unable to break away from the past and see things in a fresh way. It doesn’t help that breaking away might mean losing everything that made them great/admired. Lack of interest and curiosity are aggravated by biological conditions, and this intellectual and emotional indifference may cause inertia. 

    Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age

    …Marcel wrote of the human tendency to become stuck in habits, received ideas, and a narrow-minded attachment to possessions and familiar scenes. Instead he urged his readers to develop a capacity for remaining “available” to situations as they arise. Similar ideas of disponibilité or availability had been explored by other writers, notably André Gide, but Marcel made it his essential existential imperative. He was aware of how rare and difficult it was. Most people fall into what he calls “crispation”: a tensed, encrusted shape in life — “as though each one of us secreted a kind of shell which gradually hardened and imprisoned him.”

    “On the Ontological Mystery,” Gabriel Marcel, via At the Existentialist Café

    And while being too lazy to type out the one above, I found someone had already written about ‘crispation’. And found this (below) there. It reminded me of the converging life Amor Towles wrote about.

    “We all end up as packaged goods,” Westbrook Pegler remarked a little while before he died. The dreary road to the wrapping and bundling counter is probably inescapable: there is the hunt for the discovery of what works, then the erosion of curiosity about what else might work, then the disappearance of all curiosity about anything unfamiliar, and at last the prison of the safety of one’s own accepted manner. Yeats was a little way off the mark; the peril for the artisan no less than for the artist is not that his circus animals may desert him but that he will let slip past the time when he ought to turn them back to the forest.

    via James Mustich

    And finally, my favourite story on what habits can do, and where I don’t want to end up. Poignant, hard-hitting, and true.

    via James Clear