Category: Flawsophy

  • The paradox of choice

    I read Tara Isabella Burton’s Strange Rites in 2023 – a book about the decline of religion and what’s replacing it. Since then, I have been connecting a few dots. This is the pattern I see.

    For most of human history, we lived in communities of circumstance. We were born into a home, a town, a religion, a trade. We didn’t have much of a choice, we just inherited it. And while it had its flaws, many people made it work. 

    (more…)

  • Reflections on my OS – 3

    Part 1 was on the OS of my life, Part 2 the professional version, both written in 2022. This one is a little more ambitious – civilisational!

    The thought stream started thanks to one of my favourite newsletters, which gave me an insightful metaphor – “Religion is the operating system of a civilisation” – attributed to Rudyard Lynch.

    One of the other insights that has taken up quite a lot of space in my mind is courtesy Ernest Becker (via The Worm at the Core) – that the awareness of our own mortality is the hidden engine of human thought, emotion, and culture. Humans apparently invented symbolic systems – everything from soul to religion to nation to art to legacy as a means of managing the terror of death.

    (more…)

  • The D&G way to Hindu Rashtra

    I think this angst really hit me at the beginning of the decade when a colleague F, in a sombre moment far removed from his otherwise jovial, chill nature, confessed that he was moving abroad because he feared staying here.

    Since that time, real life comments by friends and acquaintances referring to the ‘others’ have bothered me, and I have questioned them on that. More recently, when I read Anjum Hasan’s “History’s Angel”, I despaired what the life of a Muslim in India is.

    (more…)

  • What made us stronger, could kill us

    In the startup scaling context, a line that often gets used is “the things that got you from 0 to 1 are not the things that get you from 1 to 100“

    The thought occurred when I was reading ‘The Inner Level’, a fantastic book about how unequal societies increase status anxiety, stress, and mental health issues across all income levels, not just the poor. 

    (more…)

  • Cena, Character & Chips

    I recently watched John Cena’s Peacemaker S2. To my mind, DC’s best recent work, Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker notwithstanding. It aired around the same time as John Cena’s WWE retirement tour, and I couldn’t help but notice the overlap of Cena’s WWE persona and the character – flawed, often clueless, but fundamentally good-hearted. Not everyone saw it that way though. A minority commented on his past politics in WWE, how he’d used his power to hold others back. Fair, I thought. But incomplete.

    (more…)