Category: Choices

  • In considerate mode

    Delivery guys riding on the wrong side of the road, kids behind you kicking your seat on a flight, speaking on the phone loudly in a public space – these are a few of my favourite peeves. I am sure you have yours too. That’s why this post on LinkedIn caught my attention – “things pissing me off” in situations where people aren’t following rules is something I could relate to.

    Barring a few exceptions where I am absolutely not able to tolerate what I believe is ‘inconsiderate behaviour’, I don’t engage. But engage or not, these instances also reveal my snap judgements. e.g. what an inconsiderate idiot, speaking loudly during a movie. I judge myself the most, but also try to intellectually understand my motivations.

    That’s why I found this particular episode of The Knowledge Project – in which Shane Parrish speaks to Todd Herman – fascinating. Around the 49th min mark, Shane asks Todd if he has a hard time relating to average people, people who just didn’t want to be the best at what they do. I could relate to it in my professional context – another pet peeve. Todd admits how despite having matured, he still has to watch out as his ego still tries to stack them as ‘average’. Todd explains that he does this because he over-indexes what he personally finds important. e.g. a career-driven person might judge someone who prioritises being a parent.

    I battle my own bugbears – punctuality, work ethic, grammar and spelling errors etc. That image below is my team taking revenge on my birthday cake. Cheapos! 😂

    The point is that others are not average/ inconsiderate people, they are at best average/inconsiderate in the thing I am over-indexing for! There are many contexts and reasons why they don’t behave in a way I think they should . As I commented on LinkedIn, I have realised that being able to afford consideration (or applying oneself) is a privilege.

    But that was level 1. When I dug deeper, I saw my real problem. When that ‘idiot’ is not following my worldview (‘ideology’) – whether it is ‘considerate behaviour’ or being conscious of spelling mistakes – it raises (in my own mind) doubts on the objective correctness of my ‘ideology’. Will Storr has a  brilliant insight – “for humans, ideology is territory”. We fight for ideas like animals fight for land.

    At this point, we have evolved to an extent where we hold hundreds of “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” in our heads. And we expect the world to comply – from nationalism to having pets/kids to the usage of the Oxford comma and so on. Any deviation from our ‘ideology’ is treated as a judgement against us. No wonder every interaction has the potential for conflict. We are defenders of our own little faiths that make up our identity. What we could practice, when we have the privilege, is to step back and think about the little judgements we make, in work and life scenarios, and then react with empathy, because it is not a personal attack.

    There have been many posts on this blog about morality, and recently, I found two quotes that connect it to judgement and empathy.

    “The drug of morality poisons empathy” ~ Will Storr (again)
    “Compassion is the basis of morality.” ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

    I found these to be an educative lesson on how I look at my subjective morality, and how I behave with others in real life.

  • A convenient path to extinction?

    It has been almost exactly 4 years since I wrote Default in our Stars. I ended that post with

    A question I asked myself while writing this was, when there is no agency, what happens to morality? My own first answer was worrying – maybe you just become numb to life’s deeper questions because there’s always an algorithm to give you something you didn’t know you wanted. And that’s the panacea that this age warrants. And hence default in our stars, and an artificial existence.

    Sometime back, a comment on an advertisement I had shared on LinkedIn on World Suicide Prevention Day led me to think again on the subject. I had a bunch of thoughts, and after I had framed it myself, I took the help of everyone’s favourite assistant to break it into byte sized points.. Given my (lack of) expertise, it’s a reach, but I love my curiosity. 🙂 So here we go, picking up specifically from the point of societal impact – reduced interactions, as algos increasingly recommend everything.

    1.  Human Interaction Decline: Before the Industrial Revolution, getting things done required relatively more human interaction. Since then, it has been declining. From real marketplaces to supermarkets to telephone operators to a faceless internet and so on. 

    2. App-Driven World: Now, apps have taken over many tasks that previously required a human touch — answering a question, booking a cab, planning vacations, ordering a meal, buying from the local shop — are all done with increasingly reduced human involvement.

    3. Command & Gratification: Apps obey without asking for explanations, giving us control and instant gratification. “Click to order”. In parallel, social media provides gratification through validation – likes, comments etc, again something that formerly happened only IRL

    4. Centre of the Universe Mindset: This on-demand gratification makes us feel like the centre of our own universe, where every gratification is possible and tailored for us, fast and friction-free. A perception that everything is my way on the information highway.

    5. Human Interaction = Tedious?: As human interactions inherently involve alternate perspectives and unpredictability, they can seem more ‘tedious’ in comparison to seamless app transactions.

    6. Natural Selection’s Role: Here’s where natural selection comes in. Entropy is relentless, and the one force that is equally relentless in trying to stop it, is natural selection. Evolution thus tries to increase order in successive iterations. That’s also how humans got here.

    7. Tech’s Push for Efficiency: In general, app interactions are more predictable than human ones, aligning with this drive for less entropy. For instance, Urban Company/Uber have automated much of this already, helping us choose predictability and efficiency over complexity in daily transactions. 

    8. Tech & Relationships: Something I missed in the original post is another connection between biology (nature) and tech. In their book The Molecule of More, Daniel Z. Lieberman and Michael E. Long describe two kinds of relationships. “Agentic” relationships orchestrated by dopamine – formed to accomplish goals, very purpose-driven, and in contrast, “affiliative” relationships – formed for connection and enjoyment, driven by oxytocin. We all know the connection between tech and dopamine, and that’s probably why we are increasingly pushed to transactional agentic relationships.

    9. Blockchain’s Faceless Trust: So, where is this going? As D pointed out when I chatted with her on this, blockchain takes this further with its “faceless, trustless” system of certainty. It’s arguably the next step in reducing unpredictability.

    10. AI and the Future: AI, despite its hallucinations, will likely bring even more predictability in both outputs and outcomes. But what does that mean for our place in this increasingly transactional world? Honestly, I’m still figuring that part out. 🤷‍♂️

    The WEIRD mindset has moved beyond its original strongholds and is becoming increasingly dominant across the globe. Money, society’s favourite currency, demands it. Munger has famously said “Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome“. It is ironic that at a species level, there might be a desire to survive, but that, at an individual level, the WEIRD penchant for autonomy and predictability is overriding it. Natural selection will have no qualms about its means of reducing entropy coming at the cost of an entire species.

  • 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 🙂