Category: Yesterday

  • 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!

  • 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

  • Three score and ten

    He was a shadow of his former self, and his memory was not what it used to be. But I could see his eyes light up when he was reminded of who I was. We spoke a bit, and I like to think that a bit of his joviality returned in those brief moments. My interactions with him are more than three decades old, and our memories of each other are probably a bigger bond than any relationship we have. He complimented my demeanour, much to the annoyance of the other M. He passed away a few weeks later. These days, I am ambivalent about meeting old people. On one hand, I think I’d like to remember them in their prime. But then again, there is a good chance that I’d be meeting them for the last time. So these days, when I do meet, my behaviour factors that in.

    The worst thing about death is the fact that when a man is dead it is impossible any longer to undo the harm you have done him, or to do the good you haven’t done him…They say: live in such a way as to be always ready to die. I would say: live in such a way that anyone can die without you having anything to regret.

    Leo Tolstoy, (via Arthur C. Brooks’ From Strength to Strength)

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  • Mall me, maybe

    On a Friday last month, D and I decided to do something on a whim. We broke our now established weekend pattern of ‘logically arguing’ with ourselves and deciding to stay at home and watch a movie on OTT. Off(line) we went to the neighbourhood mall to watch a Malayalam movie, which turned out to be excellent, though the movie hall was just about half-packed. Since we’d had an early dinner, we decided to drop in at a Third Wave that we thought was new. But we hadn’t been to the mall in ages, and couldn’t be sure.

    In a lovely post titled Fountains of Youths, Jamie Loftus visits food courts from Alaska to Arizona and talks to teens about the local mall, and their favourite fare at the food courts. As I read it, I found myself time travelling to the 80s. To Suburban Store in well, the suburbs of Cochin. It was a department store but with malls being non-existent this was magic enough for me. They had two aisles full of toys after all. In the 90s, it was Abad Plaza on Cochin’s main street, the only place that had French fries! 🙂

    Zoom to the early 2000s and Transit at the Forum Mall, Koramangala was a regular hangout. We weren’t teens, but if Jamie talked to us, we would have had a few perspectives. In the 2010s, when Phoenix opened shop in Whitefield, we used to make the trek twice a year from Koramangala for the end of season sale. And chocolate momos at the food court were a ritual.

    Our visits have dwindled since then, and just before COVID, I was melancholic about my snobbery (or about finally adulting?) when passing through a food court, I realised that my sensibilities had changed to an extent where I asked D, how we could have eaten this! And in the context of the mall, “why are so many people here!” 😐

    At 10PM, we were one of a handful of customers at Third Wave. I sat sipping a Chamomile (I had given up after experiments at home, but thanks to this, realised that it is possible not to thoroughly destroy something!). The shops were closed and my cherished people-gawking pastime was impossible, but I realised I liked this. Late night in an empty mall. The coffee shop is adjacent to a book store and I told D that I missed the ‘discoveries’ at book stores. Amazon has spoilt me.

    One of two other customers at the coffee shop was an elderly man. It was only when his driver (I think) came to wheel him out that I noticed he was in a wheelchair. He tried to convince his helper to have something, and failed. He left, checking out books as the security watched him, and smiling at us as he went past. I sighed. A few minutes later, we paid and left. Once upon a time we would have walked home, but the roads have too many dogs that turn to dire wolves. Once upon a time, I’d have carried a stick, but now a fight has too many downsides.

    Something has shifted in me, I realised, as I turned back to look at the mall before getting into the cab. Maybe I will give Crossword some of my book business. And every once in a while, watch a movie in theatres. Discovery doesn’t just work for books. There is a joy in seeing other people laugh at the jokes while watching a movie, smiling back at an old man in a wheelchair in a mall at 10PM, and just seeing people outside the confines of a screen or an office. It seems we have come full circle. We are human again.

  • Possessions

    I paused to take one final stock of the room. When I looked out of the window, I could see the mezzanine balcony. I doubt he had stood there, looking at it as I did. From his vantage point on the bed, he’d have seen the far wall. Photos, an album of life. I sat for a while on the bed, looking at a suitcase that wrapped up the last remnants of a life.

    But one day, years after the convergence has begun, you cannot only sense the inward trajectory of the walls, you can begin to see the terminal point in the offing even as the terrain that remains ​before you​ begins to shrink at an accelerating pace.

    …the three infirmities amount to the same sentence: the narrowing of life at the far tip of the diamond. Step by step, the stomping grounds of these friends had shrunk from the world itself, to their country, to their county, to their home, and finally to a single room where, blinded, breathless, forgetful, they are destined to end their days. Though Abacus had no infirmities to speak of yet, his world too was shrinking. He too had watched as the outer limits of his life had narrowed from the world at large, to the island of Manhattan, to that book-lined office in which he awaited with a philosophical resignation the closing of the finger and thumb. 

    The Lincoln Highway, Amor Towles

    In the second half of my life, I am now able to visualise this a lot more easily. There is something bittersweet about this. Like when I give away clothes. I am sometimes forced to pause for a minute because a particular tee would trigger memories of a different time. A different me. And by giving it away it is almost as though that part of me is now beyond retrieval.

    Later, when I got home, I looked around. The contents of our life, now. I’m sure all of it is subject to change. Home is after all a construct of the past, present, and future.. Things that point us to the past and helps us remember it as we grow older. Things that point us to the future, and help us visualise it the way we are imagining it now. And things that point us today to our self image. The things we possess, and the things that possess us. What would happen when they all start shrinking? As we clutch what we can remember of the past, struggle to imagine what can change in the future, and watch our self image shrinking? I suspect that is how the physical space too starts shrinking. Or maybe it works both ways.

    As I think about that suitcase now, and the remains of a lifetime, I wonder if he would have liked them to be in ‘the foreign object‘, a part of his happier days, which I had appropriated a decade later. I have no idea what will happen to the latter when I am gone. A cross-section of a life that no one needs to remember. And it makes me wonder as I look around again, all of these possessions which seemingly give our life meaning now, only have that meaning when we are around.