Category: Life Ordinary

  • A sense of senescence

    Srinivas Rao drives me to work on a Monday morning in his WagonR. He is probably in his 50s, there seems to be many more older cab drivers these days. At work, we are busy with the survey we run at this time of the year. We have been doing this for the last three years – asking our customers what financial freedom means to them. Retiring without worries is a common theme, and unfortunately, not something many are prepared for. Mr.Rao would have probably given me a sardonic smile if I had asked for his take. He is the dystopian future my scarcity mindset throws at me – me lasting longer than my money, and thus being forced to work even in old age.

    Later in the week, a friend sends me a Shashi Tharoor column from a few years ago, titled “In Praise of Gerontocracy“, in which he makes a case for the years after 60 being the most productive in one’s life.

    In praise of Gerontocracy ~ Shashi Tharoor

    D immediately and rightly pointed out how the privilege is so deeply embedded that it’s not even an afterthought. I also wondered whether the massive changes in physical (diet, exercise, pollution), as well as mental and emotional (social media, work stress) changes that separate the earlier generations from the current ones, have been factored in. There is a limit to what science and medicine can currently accomplish. In real life, we see our own elderly relatives sometimes struggling to even comprehend what is happening to the one person they thought they knew – themselves.

    I have been reading Maus, which has had quite an effect on me. It wasn’t just the Holocaust and its horrors, it was also what happened to Vladek, the author’s father, a survivor, on whom the book is based. Old age with all of the baggage of what he had gone through, and no one around who could really understand his mindset and behaviour.

    It took me back to something I had read earlier – The Coming of Age (1970). Simone de Beauvoir writes how old age exposes the failure of our entire civilisation. “The sadness of old people is not caused by any particular event or set of circumstances: it merges with their consuming boredom, with their bitter and humiliating sense of uselessness, and their loneliness in the midst of a world that has nothing but indifference for them.” The loss of standing, the fear of illnesses and injury, jealousy, and the resulting seeming selfishness, the grief of losing others whom they considered part of their future, are all poignantly captured in the book. They thus turn back to themes that are emotionally valuable to them, and replay them constantly, they ‘escape from the present and dream of former happiness, exorcise past misfortunes.’ 

    What is in our hands is how we prepare for it – mentally, physically, emotionally, and financially. Uma Shashikant sums that up quite well in her recent article.

    There is really no freedom from old age, and I acutely realise that at some point, we will all end up saying “in my time” – about the time we looked upon ourselves as first-class individuals, doing our best work, feeling like we belonged in this world. It is indeed a great time, but that window is bound to close, and those who live long will ‘have that melancholy privilege of remaining alone in a new world‘. (Ninon de Lenclos) 

  • Moral Signs 2

    “It’s these times. Morality is a moving target”

    Robert Folger, Snowpiercer

    A ‘grandchild’ at work wants to move to an edtech. She is convinced it’s an ‘opportunity that she won’t get later’. I contest on both counts. She is immensely talented, and given her work ethic, it is easy to see that she will be an absolute star. I would like her to do well, but it is an organisation I have actively talked against – IRL and on Twitter – and there is enough proof of its misdeeds. She wasn’t aware of this, and is nonplussed, but doesn’t want to turn back now. I bring up our debates on how she felt Seagram’s “Men will be men” was legitimising misogyny, and furthering a regressive world view. That got us on to morality. I remembered the ‘professional’ version I had written a while ago and sent it to her. I also remembered that I had meant to write this personal version earlier.

    Morality and self image

    (from the previous version)

    “We’re living in an era of ‘woke’ capitalism, right? I’m Nike, I pretend to care about black people. You pretend to hate capitalism and buy my trainers.”

    “Industry” (BBC/HBO)

    This pretension helps us retain our self image while consuming the things and experiences. There is narrative cohesion while avoiding uncomfortable truths. And sometimes, even some virtue signalling. 

    In general, the world is hyper competitive, and the choices we make might not sit well with self image, especially when morality is also at play. In the post, I had brought up the point that having a moral compass means saying goodbye to what would be considered lucrative opportunities. Even more so in the last few years. Crypto, real money gaming, fintech, edtech – the big pillars of the recent startup boom – all have moral loopholes (generalising). Same goes for Big Tech. But now regulation and external factors are catching up.

    The self image is gloating with “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.) But everything is a cycle.

    Let’s go beyond work and take say, entertainment. Recently, I tweeted

    You can catch many discussions on Saudi blood money around the web. If one were absolutely moral, one should immediately stop watching these sports. I don’t watch any of these, but that’s largely because I am uninterested.

    And anyway, I can make similar cases against movies and every other general consumption – apparel, on-demand deliveries, house help, and practically every daily touchpoint. It isn’t easy for me to slither out of everything.

    As you can see, being very objective about one’s own morality is dangerous for self image, and thus sanity. Maybe that compromise is the origin story of cancel culture (canceling on Twitter only, not in life). While I can see how that helps self image, I also do believe there is a limit to not being objective about oneself.

    Morality is plastic

    The Activa is being sold to the husband of one of the housekeeping staff at the apartment. He comes by on a Saturday evening, after his daily labours, and shows me his Aadhar card on a taped-up plastic-covered mobile phone. He doesn’t know how to forward it, so he’d give me a photocopy, he says. He also insists that I count the cash. He seems very particular that I treat the entire transaction with the dignity it deserves, including our price negotiation. It furthers my own narrative about why I shouldn’t give it to him for free, but hey, I am watching me. I know that an equal reason is that this amount is part payment for something I have been eyeing. Something I don’t need but would like to have. I tell myself that he and his family will be rid of a few commute problems at a lower cost. That it’s a net positive.

    There is an intense discussion happening in the apartment WhatsApp group – a couple of street hawkers (no, not fancy bikers) have set up shop on the pavement and the residents are worried about the area becoming a hub, and thus creating bigger problems. I see the case for shooing them away though I won’t voice it. I also won’t voice the contrarian view – D and I didn’t want to trigger a WhatsApp war. I see one of the hawkers when D and I go for a stroll after dinner. He is selling plastic items, and is using one of his buckets as the seat. It is around 9PM on a Saturday night. He is older than I am, and I begin to think about my conversation in office about how our chairs aren’t ergonomic enough.

    A moral operating system

    I used to judge myself by the only morality is action, but I couldn’t handle all the trade-off. I also realise that this entire conversation is from a position of privilege. And that my estimation of how easy that makes it, is woefully lowballing it. I remind myself that there is no morality in nature, only causality (Jonathan Haidt). Maybe we need to evolve a lot more if we need morality and practicality to co-exist. And maybe that won’t happen.

    So what can I do? I can stretch myself and do the right thing even if it takes me away from my comforts. I can recognise the limits, and stop being judgmental of self and others.

    Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.

    Rumi

  • The ride of a lifetime

    The year was 2008. For 7 years, I had been serving as a palliative care owner to second hand two-wheelers. This included manually-powered visits to workshops every other day, to the extent I had called the original one Potential Honda, because it was Kinetic only occasionally! And that’s how I finally decided to take the bold step of buying a brand new two-wheeler for the first time in my life, at double the cost of my mobile. I bring that up because now Activa competes with the likes of Apple and Samsung for the share of wallet!

    Fast forward to 2013, when D got herself a four wheeler, and a driver, I cajoled her into letting me use both, and stopped using the Activa for office commute. But it still was my go-to vehicle for chores. From about 2016, I became an Uber regular, but the Activa continued its role. I think it was the pandemic, and then the zoning out that separated us.

    And thus, here we are in 2022, and I am wondering how does one say goodbye to a partner who has been with you in your 20s, 30s and 40s! But I have to. Unlike the foreign object and these guys, the maintenance effort is not trivial. It doesn’t help that it needs a fitment certificate later this year!

    And thus this thank you post. To a relationship in which I cheated on you with another two-wheeler only once – when they insisted I use a wheelchair when going in for an angioplasty last year. To a relationship in which we got hurt just once – back in 2010 in Austin Town on a rainy night. I remember crying that night, as I picked you up and continued home, because a truckload of things made life seem so unfair. I am older and a little wiser now, and life doesn’t seem very unfair, but I thought of the lifetime we’ve been through and blinked back tears, when I stood gazing at you before I put you up for sale.

  • A proxy life

    I have forgotten where I first came across Goodhart’s Law. It was probably Farnam Street. It states that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” An illustration should help.

    https://sketchplanations.com/goodharts-law

    In the organisational context, it serves as a great lens to evaluate strategy and progress. As the illustration above shows, the entire direction of a desired goal can be changed when measures become targets. But, and maybe it’s a Baader -Meinhof phenomenon, I am now seeing different versions of it everywhere.

    To set some context, as more and more things have been digitised, the volume of information has just exploded. For instance, before the advent of social media, there were limits to one’s “people like me” canvas, because even an awareness of them was constrained by physical distances and the limits of one’s social circle. It had to be in real life, and public spaces like a cinema or even a vacation spot were probably an extreme. Social media changed that scale massively. Many factors including this volume of information, the lack of a granular understanding of the lives of this new set of people whom you’d never meet, and the innate human desire to do better than neighbours meant that appearances became the norm. Since we are not wired to process such large volumes of information, we dug deeper into ‘measurement by proxy.’ Not that this mode of measurement is new. For instance, we have used material manifestations (apparel, cars etc) as a measure of wealth. The stock price is a single-number measure of everything about the company. But with abundance of choice and the limits of processing power, we started developing heuristics and measuring what was easy. Meta photos (FB/Insta/WhatsApp) became a measure of everything from the quality of life to the strength of relationships. Popularity as a measure of excellence, price as a measure of quality, fitness as a measure of health, #booksread as a measure of erudition and so on.

    How does this connect to Goodhart’s Law? We end up optimising our resources for the measure, not the end goal. Which means that though the goal is say, happiness and a good quality of life, we end up aiming for the measure. From the kind of photo that will get more likes to buying that thing/experience that will surely make us happy. And as we feed this more, the mind keeps on wanting. The happiness fades in a short span of time. And as the Buddha has wisely pointed out, that loss of happiness is what becomes suffering.

    In the AI risk narrative, there is the story of the paperclip maximiser, a seemingly trivial task of maximising paperclips that might lead to “first all of earth and then increasing portions of space into paperclip manufacturing facilities”. The corresponding human version that I wrote in Peak Abstraction was that maybe we will get to a state where, if we get enough likes on the couple photo on Insta, there would be relationship bliss! What a wonderful world.

  • Designing my desires

    A world of transactional efficiency

    It was a little over 4 years ago that I first brought up the increasingly transactional nature of our interactions and even existence in general. I was reminded of it while listening to Amit Varma’s podcast with Nirupama Rao. Interestingly, they brought up contexts similar to what I had used – mails and rails. I had used birthday greetings going from long mails/cards to a ‘Like’ on someone else wishing the person a birthday. Travel was the other context, and I liked Amit’s example of train journeys being a unique experience. In contrast to say, the flight from point A to B.

    Last year, around the same time, I had framed it as An Efficient Existence, and used the example of Taylor Pearson’s 4 minute songs – the timeframe he had mentioned for songs in the context of  certain rules that creators need to follow if they want their work to be consumed and appreciated. I had brought up an earlier era of Floyd, Springsteen, Fleetwood Mac etc whose songs didn’t follow that template. Demand or supply, what happened first, I asked. Does it have to do with the abundance of choice now, and the demands of instant gratification? While templated packages for all sorts of consumption are increasingly the norm, people also want to finish and move on to the next thing on their list. Transactions. (Generalising), there seems to be very less desire to have an immersive experience. Outside the screen, that is. As the Spotify ads show (unintentionally and literally) we’re usually in a bubble, oblivious to our surroundings.

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